TongueDx : A tongue diagnosis system for personal health care on smartphone

On the TongueDx system, users can keep track of their health condition by recording the color of tongue coating and body on smartphones. In fact, this method is based on the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) theories. Tongue diagnosis is one of the important diagnosing techniques in TCM. In order to avoid color error affected by surrounding light, a tongue color calibration by using teeth color as a standard is proposed in this paper. K-means algorithm is used to separate tongue coating from body. From the line graph of tongue coating and body color displayed on smartphones, people could know their health conditions timely and early discovery of some diseases without going to the hospital comes to be possible. If necessary, the personal tongue images can be sent to TCM practitioners to get further diagnosis. In the long run, the tongue image database is probably valuable for TCM research from time being.