sHEMO: Smartphone Spectroscopy for Blood Hemoglobin Level Monitoring in Smart Anemia-care

Anemia occurs due to low blood hemoglobin levels, and for its mass screening, both invasive and smart anemia-care techniques are used. However, significant drawbacks include high costs, lack of state-of-the-art facilities, invasive techniques, and lack of smartphone implementation, using additional equipment and non-autonomous functioning, for smart anemia-care techniques. The paper proposes a novel, autonomous, smart anemia-care technique to address these problems in the form of a spectroscopy based blood hemoglobin level monitoring model. This approach uses a smartphone camera as a sensor. It quantifies the hemoglobin level based on the region of interest’s color spectroscopy, which is the conjunctival pallor, extracted autonomously. Anemia is diagnosed if the predicted hemoglobin level is < 11.5 g dL−1. For easy smartphone implementation, the proposed model uses image analysis techniques to estimate the hemoglobin level. Our model reports an accuracy of ±0.32 g dL−1, sensitivity of 89% compared to the actual blood hemoglobin levels (n = 65 participants). Also, the model remains robust to a wide range of illumination and the type of device used. It thereby establishes itself as a reliable and suitable replacement for the blood-based laboratory hemoglobin tests by leveraging the feature of at-home diagnosis of anemia.