How analyse a pulse?

[YikUTM]

I planned to write a program that analyse the pulse rate which is from an external sound file. If the pulse rate is high, it will display a health advice.

Is this possible? What to begin with? Any help is appreciated...

[Repeater]

This is a subject with a vast range of existing literature. But that's not so important right now.

Can you get that sound file and extract from it values? What are the values you can get? What is your actual data? What's the sampling rate? How many channels are there? Once you've opened the file and read in the data, what do you have to operate on?