Deriving Heart Rate and Respiratory Rate from Pulse Oximetry Data

Abstract

Respiratory Rate (RR) is a vital sign representing air movement in and out of the body. Neglecting the respiratory rate can foresee the patient being at risk. The lack of portable device in a point of care unit, i.e. ambulances, can be a demanding task. In this study, the researchers developed a hardware device that can measure resting Heart Rate (HR) and RR from a custom pulse oximeter tethered to the Arduino board using signal processing to extract HR and Symlet Wavelet Transform to extract the RR. The derived HR and RR from a custom pulse oximeter is compared to a clinical-grade pulse oximeter and yielded an MSE of around 3.8. Moreover, results obtained from the custom pulse oximeter vs the reference are close and valid.