Design of an e-Health Respiration and Body Posture Monitoring System and Its Application for Rib Cage and Abdomen Synchrony Analysis

Automated methods of real-time and un-obstructive patient´s respiration and position monitoring have been subjects of interests in e-health applications. The present study implements a low-cost and convenient monitoring system for patients with breathing problems or sleep disorders. We have also captured the Rib Cage (RC) and Abdomen (AB) movements using accelerometer sensors. In addition to measurement of phase shift between the chest wall compartments, the impacts of different body positions on AB and RC motions have been investigated. The performance of the presented system is evaluated and the average Mean Square Error (MSE) of 0.14 is achieved for three breath timing variables. Moreover, the overall errors of phase angles for paradoxical and synchronous breath patterns are 0.25°±0.06 and 0.26°±6E-03, respectively. The system properly indicates a significant increase in the degree of ribcage and abdomen asynchrony in the paradoxical breathing compared to normal pattern.