Contact-Free Monitoring of Pulse Rate For Triage of Patients Presenting to the Emergency Department.

Background: The evaluation of a patient's pulse rate (PR) plays a key role in emergency triage and is commonly measured in a contact-dependent way.

Objective: Our aims were to evaluate a camera-based prototype application (CBPA) measuring PR in an emergency department (ED) as an alternative to the current contact-dependent method of pulse oximetry and to determine the correlation between CBPA and pulse oximetry in measuring PR.

Methods: We simultaneously measured PR with CBPA and pulse oximetry as a reference method on a large group of ED walk-in patients.