Abstract
Infants with fragile skin are patients who would benefit from non-contact vital sign monitoring due to the avoidance of potentially harmful adhesive electrodes and cables. Non-contact vital signs monitoring has been studied in clinical settings in recent decades. However, studies on infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) are still limited. Therefore, we conducted a single-center study to remotely monitor the heart rate (HR) and respiratory rate (RR) of seven infants in NICU using a digital camera. The region of interest (ROI) was automatically selected using a convolutional neural network and signal decomposition was used to minimize the noise artefacts. The experimental results have been validated with the reference data obtained from an ECG monitor. They showed a strong correlation using the Pearson correlation coefficients (PCC) of 0.9864 and 0.9453 for HR and RR, respectively, and a lower error rate with RMSE 2.23 beats/min and 2.69 breaths/min between measured data and reference data. A Bland–Altman analysis of the data also presented a close correlation between measured data and reference data for both HR and RR. Therefore, this technique may be applicable in clinical environments as an economical, non-contact, and easily deployable monitoring system, and it also represents a potential application in home health monitoring.
Highlights
Accepted: 19 July 2021A delivery between 37 and 42 weeks of gestation is defined as term pregnancy by theWorld Health Organization [1]
To evaluate the proposed non-contact system, we considered statistical methods based on the Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC), linear regression, Bland–Altman plot, root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE)
The experimental results showed a strong correlation with Pearson correlation coefficients (PCC) values of 0.9864 and 0.9453 for heart rate (HR) and respiratory rate (RR), respectively, and a lower error rate with RMSE values of
Summary
A delivery between 37 and 42 weeks of gestation is defined as term pregnancy by the. World Health Organization [1]. Preterm birth is defined as any birth prior to 37 weeks of gestation, and it is a priority health issue worldwide. It is projected that more than one in ten of the infants in the world are born prematurely [2]. As preterm infants are not completely developed and have a tendency to have medical conditions that need specialist care, they are often placed into the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) immediately after birth [3]. Infants in the NICU have unstable vital signs. According to their particular requirements, specialized medical equipment is used to estimate their physiological condition [4]
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