The paper presents a feasibility study for heart rate measurement using a digital camera to perform health monitoring. The feasibility study investigates the reliability of the state of the art heart rate measuring methods in realistic situations. Therefore, an experiment was designed and carried out on 45 subjects to investigate the effects caused by illumination, motion, skin tone, and distance variance. The experiment was conducted for two main scenarios; human-computer interaction scenario and health monitoring scenario. The human-computer scenario investigated the effects caused by illumination variance, motion variance, and skin tone variance. The health monitoring scenario investigates the feasibility of health monitoring at public spaces (i.e. airports, subways, malls). Five state of the art heart rate measuring methods were re-implemented and tested with the feasibility study database. The results were compared with ground truth to estimate the heart rate measurement error. The heart rate measurement error was analyzed using mean error, standard deviation; root means square error and Pearson correlation coefficient. The findings of this experiment inferred promising results for health monitoring of subjects standing at a distance of 500 cm. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd