Decomposition method of an electrical bio-impedance signal into cardiac and respiratory components

The paper presents a method for adaptive decomposition of an electrical bio-impedance (BI) signal into two components: cardiac and respiratory. The decomposition of a BI signal is not a trivial process because of the non-stationarity of the signal components and overlapping of their harmonic spectra. An application specific orthonormal basis (ASOB) was designed to solve the decomposition task using the Jacobi weighting function in the standard Gram-Schmidt process. The key element of the bio-impedance signal decomposer (BISD) is a model of the cardiac BI signal, which is constructed from the components of the ASOB and is intended for use in the BISD for on-line tracking of the cardiac BI signal. It makes it possible to separate the cardiac and respiratory components of the total BI signal in non-stationary conditions. In combination with the signal-shape locked loop (SSLL), the BISD allows us to decompose the BI signals with partially overlapping spectra. The proposed BISD based method is accomplished as a PC software digital system, but it is oriented towards applications in portable and stationary cardiac devices and in clinical settings.