A New Smartphone-Based Method for Remote Health Monitoring: Assessment of Respiratory Kinematics

Abstract

The remote monitoring of clinical parameters plays a fundamental role in different situations, like pandemic health emergencies and post-surgery conditions. In these situations, the patients might be impeded in their movements, and it could be difficult to have specific health monitoring. In recent years, technological advances in smartphones have opened up new possibilities in this landscape. The present work aims to propose a new method for respiratory kinematics monitoring via smartphone sensors. In particular, a specific application was developed to register inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor data from the smartphone for respiratory kinematics measurement and to guide the user through a specific acquisition session. The session was defined to allow the monitoring of the respiratory movement in five prescribed positions. The application and the sequence were successfully tested on a given population of 77 healthy volunteers. The resulting accelerometers and gyroscope signals were processed to evaluate the significance of differences according to participants’ sex, vector components, and smartphone positioning and, finally, to estimate the respiratory rate. The statistical differences that emerged revealed the significance of information in the different acquisition positions.