Assessment of Prolonged Expiration Breathing Using Infrared Thermal Imaging Modality: A Case Study

Breathing is one of the important vital signs assessed by healthcare practitioner for patient monitoring and disease management. There are several methods used to evaluate breathing activities such as respiratory belt transducer, impedance pneumography, bioacoustics method and spirometry. Some of these devices require external attachment on patient such as belt, electrodes and sensor which could be inconvenient if used over long period of times. Infrared Thermal Imaging (ITI) is a contactless device that detects temperature changes which can be used to assess breathing since hot air particles are being released to surrounding through nose which create temperature variance during breathing. Since majority of studies done on breathing function were focused on respiratory rate, hence, in this study we would like to assess the timing of inspiration (TI) and expiration (TE) in prolonged expiration breathing using Infrared Thermal Imaging (ITI). This study involved 4 subjects that are required to simulate our designed prolonged expiration breathing which will be guided by a video. The assessment of TI and TE will be recorded using ITI and Respiratory Inductive Plethysmograph (RIP) simultaneously. Graph pattern plotted from the ITI images show consistent deflections on the graph which reflect the transition point of inspiration and expiration. This transition point allowed us to measure the TI and TE. Our main analysis shows that there were no significant differences of the reading obtained by ITI and RIP in TI and TE. This data suggest that the performance of ITI was almost equivalent to RIP and could be used as an alternative method for breathing assessment.