Fusion Learning on Multiple-Tag RFID Measurements for Respiratory Rate Monitoring

Future advances in the medical Internet of Things (IoT) will require sensors that are unobtrusive and passively powered. With the use of wireless, wearable, and passive knitted smart garment sensors, we monitor infant respiratory activity. We improve the utility of multi-tag Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) measurements via fusion learning across various features from multiple tags to determine the magnitude and temporal information of the artifacts. In this paper, we develop an algorithm that classifies and separates respiratory activity via a Regime Hidden Markov Model compounded with higher-order features of Minkowski and Mahalanobis distances. Our algorithm improves respiratory rate detection by increasing the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) on average from 17.12 dB to 34.74 dB. The effectiveness of our algorithm in increasing SNR shows that higher-order features can improve signal strength detection in RFID systems. Our algorithm can be extended to include more feature sources and can be used in a variety of machine learning algorithms for respiratory data classification, and other applications. Further work on the algorithm will include accurate parameterization of the algorithm's window size.