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I have a weird question here. I'm doing research on using a smartwatch to monitor people's sleep quality. One of my goals is to monitor blood oxygen.

I know that most smartwatches today can monitor heart rate by emitting green light and inferred on the back. I also know that pulse oximeters people use to monitor blood oxygen today emit red light and inferred. My idea is to let smartwatch emits red light to detect blood oxygen.

However, I cannot find any way to change the color of LED lights. I searched Android Wear API and it looks like there is no such API.

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you!

Yifei Xiao
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  • You'll need to look at the exact physical specifications of the watch to see if this is possible. The LEDs on the back may be only one colour. Multi-colour LEDs are typically more expensive and require more circuitry to integrate. – tadman Sep 23 '19 at 20:14
  • Thank you @tadman, is there any place I can check these physical specifications like handbook. Or I have to disassemble it. – Yifei Xiao Sep 23 '19 at 20:38
  • Depends on the watch and the manufacturer. – tadman Sep 24 '19 at 18:10

1 Answers1

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LEDs are physically one colour or another. You cannot change them electronically. Any application that does this will actually be using arrays or different LEDs to simulate the change.

Android wear is an operating system. Without knowing the physical device you're talking about it's difficult to answer this.

Mark Taylor
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  • Hi Mark, thank you for your answer. That's what I'm worried about. I cannot change the color if the LED light only contains one color. Do you know if there is any place I can check if my watch supports multi-colors? I have Apple Watch, some Sony smartwatch, and some Huawei watches. – Yifei Xiao Sep 23 '19 at 20:35
  • There's no central repository for this information that I'm aware of - but most manufacturers have detailed technical specs - I expect you'll just have to search for them individually unfortunately. Good luck! – Mark Taylor Sep 23 '19 at 20:37