Affiliations: [a] Department of Electrical, Electronic and Systems Engineering, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia | [b] Department of Emergency Medicine, UKM Medical Centre Jalan Yaacob Latif, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: K.B. Gan, Department of Electrical, Electronic and Systems Engineering, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 UKM Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia. Tel.: +603 8921 7149; Fax: +603 8911 8359; E-mail:gankokbeng@ukm.edu.my
Abstract: BACKGROUND: At the emergency triage center, assessment of the
present of the danger signs and measurement of vital signs are measured
according to the guidelines. The respiration rate is still posing a
challenge to the doctor as it is impractical to use conventional devices.
Attaching measurement devices to the patient will induce artificial
measurements (self-awareness stress effects) besides being time-consuming.
Currently, the medical officers visually count the number of times the chest
movement in a minute, sometimes poses cultural challenges especially for
female patients. OBJECTIVE: The main objective of this paper is to develop a robust
algorithm to extract respiration rate using the contactless displacement
sensor. METHODS: In this study, chest movements were used as an indicative
of inspiration and expiration to measure respiratory rate using the
contactless displacement sensor. The contactless optical signals were
recorded from 32 healthy subjects in four different controlled breathing
conditions: rest, coughing, talking and hand movement to obtain the motion
artifacts that the patients may have in the emergency department. The
Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) algorithm was used to derive continuous
RR signal from the contactless optical signal. RESULTS: The analysis showed that there is a good correlation
(0.9702) with RMSE of 0.33 breaths per minutes between the contact
respiration rate and contactless respiration rate using empirical mode
decomposition method. CONCLUSION: It can be concluded that the empirical mode
decomposition method can extract the respiration rate of the contactless
optical signal from chest movement.
