title: A contact-free respiration monitor for smart bed and ambulatory monitoring applications.
abstract: The development of a contact-free respiration monitor has a broad range of clinical applications in the home and hospital setting. Current approaches suffer from a variety of problems including unreliability, low sensitivity, and high cost. This work describes a novel approach to contact-free respiration monitoring that addresses these shortcomings by employing a highly sensitive capacitance sensor to detect variations in capacitive coupling caused by breathing. A prototype system consisting of a synthetic-metallic pad, sensor electronics, and iPhone interface was built and its performance compared experimentally to the gold standard technique (Respiratory Inductance Plethysmography) on both a healthy volunteer and SimMan robotic mannequin. The prototype sensor effectively captured respiratory movements over breathing rates of 5-55 bpm; achieving an average spectral correlation of 0.88 (CI: 0.86-0.90) and 0.95 (CI: 0.95-0.96) to the gold standard using the SimMan and healthy volunteer respectively.
authors.affiliation: Medical school at McGill University, Montreal, PQ, Canada. adam.hart@mail.mcgill.ca
authors.forename: Adam
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hart
authors.forename: Kevin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Tallevi
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Wickland
authors.forename: Robert E
authors.initials: RE
authors.lastname: Kearney
authors.forename: Joseph A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Cafazzo
mesh_terms: D040421:Cell Phone; D004867:Equipment Design; D019544:Equipment Failure Analysis; D006801:Humans; D018670:Monitoring, Ambulatory / Q000295:instrumentation*; D019095:Point-of-Care Systems; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012129:Respiratory Function Tests / Q000379:methods*; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D017216:Telemedicine / Q000295:instrumentation*; D013686:Telemetry / Q000295:instrumentation*