Abstract
Respiratory activity is an important vital sign of life that can indicate health status. Diseases such as bronchitis, emphysema, pneumonia and coronavirus cause respiratory disorders that affect the respiratory systems. Typically, the diagnosis of these diseases is facilitated by pulmonary auscultation using a stethoscope. We present a new attempt to develop a lightweight, comprehensive wearable sensor system to monitor respiration using a multi-sensor approach. We employed new wearable sensor technology using a novel integration of acoustics and biopotentials to monitor various vital signs on two volunteers. In this study, a new method to monitor lung function, such as respiration rate and tidal volume, is presented using the multi-sensor approach. Using the new sensor, we obtained lung sound, electrocardiogram (ECG), and electromyogram (EMG) measurements at the external intercostal muscles (EIM) and at the diaphragm during breathing cycles with 500 mL, 625 mL, 750 mL, 875 mL, and 1000 mL tidal volume. The tidal volumes were controlled with a spirometer. The duration of each breathing cycle was 8 s and was timed using a metronome. For each of the different tidal volumes, the EMG data was plotted against time and the area under the curve (AUC) was calculated. The AUC calculated from EMG data obtained at the diaphragm and EIM represent the expansion of the diaphragm and EIM respectively. AUC obtained from EMG data collected at the diaphragm had a lower variance between samples per tidal volume compared to those monitored at the EIM. Using cubic spline interpolation, we built a model for computing tidal volume from EMG data at the diaphragm. Our findings show that the new sensor can be used to measure respiration rate and variations thereof and holds potential to estimate tidal lung volume from EMG measurements obtained from the diaphragm.
Highlights
Reliable unobtrusive monitoring of respiration is of great importance in critically ill patients and ordinary healthy people
The area under the curve (AUC) values for EMG per breathing cycle for different tidal volumes collected at the diaphragm for the male subject is higher than the female subject
Our study shows that EMG measurements at both the external intercostal muscles (EIM) and diaphragm vary nonlinearly with tidal volume
Summary
Reliable unobtrusive monitoring of respiration is of great importance in critically ill patients and ordinary healthy people. Several research groups have reported various respiration monitoring methods. We need to overcome some technical challenges to develop genuinely wearable sensors that can become practical and clinically meaningful. Continuous respiratory monitoring requires to address the technical issues of battery power source, sensor data storage, wireless data communication, and automated diagnosis [1,2]. Stretchable sensors, such as strain gauges and many novel materials embedded bands, were attached to the human chest to measure local strain realizing the respiration monitoring [3,4,5]. The inertial measurement units (IMU) were attached to the abdomen and chest to monitor respiratory behaviors [8,9,10]. Recently skin-mounted soft electronics were reported to detect the human motions toward motion recognition [11,12,13]
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