Respiratory rate monitoring using infrared sensors

Respiratory rate is an essential parameter in many practical applications such as patient and elderly people monitoring. In this paper, a novel contact-free system is introduced to detect the human breathing activity. The system, which consists of two pyro-electric infrared (PIR) sensors, is capable of estimating the respiratory rate and detecting the sleep apnea. Sensors´ signals corresponding to the thoracic movements of a human being are sampled using a microprocessor and analyzed on a general-purpose computer. Sampled signals are processed using empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and a new average magnitude difference function (AMDF) is used to detect the periodicity and the period of the processed signals. The resulting period, by using the fact that breathing is almost a periodic activity, is monitored as the respiratory rate. The new AMDF provides a way to fuse the data from the multiple sensors and generate a more reliable estimation of the respiratory rate.