A Portable Low-Cost Respiration Rate Measurement System for Sleep Apnea Detection

Continuous monitoring of breathing activity is vital in detecting respiratory-based diseases such as obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and hypopnea. Sleep apnea (SA) is a potentially dangerous sleep problem that occurs when a person's breathing stops and begins periodically while they sleep. In addition, SA interrupts sleep, causing significant daytime sleepiness, weirdness, and irritability. This study aims to design a single inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor-based system to analyze the respiratory rate of humans. The results of the developed system is validated with the Equivital Wireless Physiological Systems for different activities. Further, the experiment has been designed to identify the optimal sensor placement location for efficient respiration rate estimation during different activities. The performance of the developed model has been quantified using breathing rate estimation accuracy (% BREA) and mean absolute error (MAE). Among all sensor placement locations and activities combinations, a window size of 30sec resulted in the worst performance, whereas a window size ≥ 60sec resulted in a better performance (p-value<0.05). In addition, the performance of the model has been found consistent for window size ≥ 60sec (p-value>0.05). For activity 3 (lying straight), comparably similar performance, 0.52±0.24 and 0.52±0.12 (p-value>0.05) have been depicted by the sensor placement position 3 (Abdomen) and position 1 (chest), respectively. Further, for the other two activities, activity 1 (sitting and working) and activity 2 (sitting straight), the best performance has been depicted as 0.32±0.18, 0.49±0.21 respectively (p-value<0.05), by the sensor placement position 2 (left ribs). This research presents a reliable, cost-effective, portable respiration monitoring system that could detect SA during sleep.