Non-contact procedure to measure heart and lung activities in preterm pediatric patients with skin disorders

Abstract

Preterm patients can have an higher risk of fatalities and can be subjected to long-term disability. With many organs still in the phase of development, the earlier the delivery, the higher the risk and they are therefore hospitalized in specialized neonatal intensive care units) where heart rate and lungs activity are continuously assessed. These are mostly monitored by set of electrodes placed in contact with skin (two in thorax area and one in abdominal area). This paper address the problem of preterm cardiac and respiratory monitoring in a patient with severe skin disorders who can not monitored with standard electrodes because of his dry, thickened, scaly skin. As a solution, we propose a fully non-contact measurement method, based on laser Doppler vibrometry, able to continuously record the movements of wall-chest and extract from this signal, the heart rate and the respiratory activity of the patient. The results show a good agreement between the standard contact measurement methods and the proposed one (no statistical difference between data) with a data uncertainty of 2.9% for the heart rate data and of 9.5% for the respiration rate (k=2), in line with the classical measurement methods.