An electromagnetic contactless system for apnea monitoring

The respiratory rate is one of the main vital parameters to be monitored in order to record the physiological and psychological status of a human being. In particular, apnea events represent a serious problem that affect adults and infants and can lead to irreversible brain damages and even to death. Despite these evidences, respiratory rate remains the less monitored parameter because of shortcomings of obstructive measurement techniques. For these reasons during last years we focused our research activity on the development of a smart electromagnetic sensing that allows remote and contactless breathing monitoring and reduces the request of collaboration of the monitored target. In this contribution we want to demonstrate that the electromagnetic approach proposed is also able to record long-time sleep breathing activity highlighting the presence of apnea events. To this aim a campaign of measurements have been conducted in a real domestic scenario and first interesting results will be shown together with some suggestions for future developments.