Wireless respiratory monitoring and coughing detection using a wearable patch sensor network

Abstract

Wireless body sensors are increasingly used by clinicians and researchers, in a wide range of applications such as sports, space engineering and medicine. Monitoring vital signs in real time can dramatically increase diagnosis accuracy and enable automatic curing procedures, e.g. detect and stop epilepsy or narcolepsy seizures. Breathing parameters are critical in oxygen therapy, hospital and ambulatory monitoring, while the assessment of cough severity is essential when dealing with several diseases, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). In this paper, a real-time low-power wireless respiratory monitoring system with cough detection is proposed to measure the breathing rate and the frequency of coughing. This system uses wearable wireless multimodal patch sensors, designed using low power off the shelf components. These wearable sensors use a low-power 9-axis inertial measurement unit to measure the respiratory frequency, and a MEMs microphone to perform cough detection. The architecture of the wireless patch-sensor is presented. The acquisition unit, the wireless communication unit and the data processing algorithms are described. The proposed network performance is presented for experimental tests with a freely behaving user.