In the hearing with walmart, walmart was shown to be reading shopper's heart rates and temp to gauge if they would buy something.

You’re going to have to back that up with a link. It is a long way from patent to implementation, and all I’ve ever seen is the patent.

A friend implemented a basic heart rate monitor using just video for a class project like 10-15 years ago. Just literally diffing pixel values per frame works, nothing more complicated than that.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5957265/

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2185520.2185561