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Wearable Spirometry: Using Integrated Environment Sensor for Breath Measurement

Authors:
Alejandro Baucells Costa
Bo Zhou
Orkhan Amiraslanov
Paul Lukowicz

Keywords: Wearable technology; Head-mounted sensing; Spirometry; Respiration detection

Abstract:
In this work, we present and evaluate a concept for using an integrated environment sensor as a wearable spirometer. Unlike a standard spirometer that by design is fairly bulky, our device can be unobtrusively integrated in various configurations suitable for long term use in every day settings (open headset, regular face mask and professional sport mask). The sensor measures the transient change in air pressure, humidity and temperature in front of wearers' mouth and nostrils. We present our hardware design and signal analysis methods needed to extract breathing rate information. We compare the results with a standard spirometer. Moreover, a calibration between the BME280 sensor and the spirometer is performed, having both working in parallel. We show that our approach is able to distinguish between normal breaths and deep breaths, as well as to capture the period and magnitude of the breath cycles, with a wearable device that can be used in everyday scenarios, as well as sport activities. The classification accuracy is 96% in face mask settings and 82% in an open headset setting. We also show that the sensor is able to approximate air volume by comparing the sensor's pressure channel to the spirometer's flow rate results.

Pages: 75 to 81

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2018

Publication date: November 18, 2018

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4278

ISBN: 978-1-61208-676-7

Location: Athens, Greece

Dates: from November 18, 2018 to November 22, 2018