Non-contact Laser-based Human Respiration Rate Measurement

At present the majority of the instrumentation, used in clinical environments, to measure human respiration rate are based on invasive and contact devices. The gold standard instrument is considered the spirometer which is largely used; it needs a direct contact and requires a collaboration by the patient. Laser Doppler Vibrometer (LDVi) is an optical, non-contact measurement system for the assessment of a surface velocity and displacement. LDVi has already been used for the measurement of the cardiac activity and for the measurement of the chest-wall displacements. The aims of this work are to select the best measurement point on the thoracic surface for LDVi monitoring of the respiration rate (RR) and to compare measured data with the RR valued provided by the spirometer. The measurement system is composed by a LDV system and a data acquisition board installed on a PC. Tests were made on 10 different point of the thorax for each patient. Patients population was composed by 33 subjects (17 male and 16 female). The optimal measurement point was chosen considering the maximum peak-to-peak value of the displacement measured by LDV. Before extracting RR we have used a special wavelet decomposition for better selection of the expiration peaks. A standard spirometer was used for the validation of the data. From tests it results that the optimal measurement point, namely is located on the inferior part of the thoracic region (left, front side). From our tests we have obtained a close correlation between the RR values measured by the spirometer and those measured by the proposed method: a difference of 14 +/- 211 ms on the RR value is reported for the entire population of 33 subjects. Our method allows a no-contact measurement of lungs activity (respiration period), reducing the electric and biological risks. Moreover it allows to measure in critical environment like in RMN or in burned skin where is difficult or impossible to apply electrodes.