A novel respiratory rate estimation method for sound-based wearable monitoring systems

The respiratory rate is a vital sign that can provide important information about the health of a patient, especially that of the respiratory system. The aim of this study is to develop a simple method that can be applied in wearable systems to monitor the respiratory rate automatically and continuously over extended periods of time. In this paper, a novel respiratory rate estimation method is presented to achieve this target. The proposed method has been evaluated in both the open-source data as well as the local-hospital data, and the results are encouraging. The findings of this study revealed strong linear correlation to the reference respiratory rate. The correlation coefficients for the open-source data and the in-hospital data are 0.99 and 0.96 respectively. The standard deviation of the estimation error is less than 7% for both types of data.