Contactless Continuous Monitoring Of Respiration

Abstract

Breathing is an important aspect of life. Monitoring of breathing signal plays an important role in clinical practice in order to determine the progression of illness. In this study the contactless modality to detect the breathing signal is assessed. For this purpose, the Laser Doppler Vibrometer (LDV) is used to detect the breathing signal. The test was performed on ten healthy volunteers and one simulator. An automatic algorithm is designed that can determine the efficiency of the contactless modality. The individuals were asked to simulate the conditions of apnea, tachypnea and bradypnea. The simulator was programmed with different respiratory rates in order to assess the functionality of the algorithm. The acquired signals were initially analyzed using manual setting of parameters and then using a standardised algorithm for every individual. The results were compared to determine the functionality. A user-friendly application was designed that allows user to set the ranges of high and low respiration rate along with the percentile value. The applications displays the pre-acquired breathing signal in real time scenarios along with the breathing tachograph and mean breathing rate. The difference between instantaneous respiration rates was found to be ±12.5% (mean value) in the case of signals acquired from human while in case of signal acquired from phantom simulator the same quantity was found to be ±1.6%.