A microcomputer-based data acquisition and analysis system for CO2 rebreathing studies

A real-time microcomputer-based data acquisition and analysis system has been developed to automate the measurement of the ventilatory response to CO2 by the rebreathing method. Previous systems acquire the data on-line and then analyze and display the results off-line. The system described here performs all processing on-line and displays experimental results in real-time. The results of 5 min of data acquisition are available for display only 1.5 sec after completion of the experiment. Immediate interpretation of the results of each experiment enable a series of related studies to be performed on the same patient in a short time period. The microcomputer is Digital Equipment Corporation's LSI-11, a low cost 16 bit machine with the basic instruction set of a PDP-11/40. The system has 16 kbytes of memory, a CRT for data display, and a paper tape reader for program loading. Due to the time constraints of real-time processing and the memory constraints of a small system, the software is written entirely in assembler language. The software includes routines for numeric and character input, line and graphical output, linear curve fitting, start of rise detection and floating point computations.