Biomedical engineering

Exhaled nitric oxide

Resistive touchscreen

Telecommunications

Respiration rate

Bluetooth

Anatomy

Wireless

Respiratory rate

Blood pressure

Spirometer

Tidal volume

Wearable computer

Asthma

Computer science

Internal medicine

Respiration

Heart rate

Respiratory system

Embedded system

Spirometry

Computer vision

Medicine

npj Digital Medicine

Current methods for continuous respiration monitoring such as respiratory inductive or optoelectronic plethysmography are limited to clinical or research settings; most wearable systems reported only measures respiration rate. Here we introduce a wearable sensor capable of simultaneously measuring both respiration rate and volume with high fidelity. Our disposable respiration sensor with a Band-Aid© like formfactor can measure both respiration rate and volume by simply measuring the local strain of the ribcage and abdomen during breathing. We demonstrate that both metrics are highly correlated to measurements from a medical grade continuous spirometer on participants at rest. Additionally, we also show that the system is capable of detecting respiration under various ambulatory conditions. Because these low-powered piezo-resistive sensors can be integrated with wireless Bluetooth units, they can be useful in monitoring patients with chronic respiratory diseases in everyday settings.

Respiration rate and volume measurements using wearable strain sensors