A Study on breathing and heartbeat monitoring system during sleeping using multi-piezoelectric elements

Abstract

Incorporating real time health monitoring systems in a non-restrictive way, can significantly improve an individual’s quality of life in the treatment of sleep disorders. This paper suggests a novel system for non-wearable, cost effective measurement of breathing and heart-beat during sleep state. The measurement system is composed of flexible multi-piezoelectric elements to acquire the pressure fluctuations persuade by respiratory movement and heart-beat when the subject is lying on it. By employing filters with predefined frequency bands, the breathing and heart-beat waveforms were extracted. The capturing of breathing & heart-beat counts was performed by normalizing the extracted waveforms using Wavelet Transform (WT) followed by Fuzzy Logic principles. Further, in the evaluation of nonbreathing time intervals, the amplitude changes in the extracted breathing waveforms were considered over its sleep event. Several experiments were conducted in order to evaluate the performance of the system on above criteria, along with a commercially available system. The experimental results suggest that the proposed method can measure and extract the related waveforms of breathing and heart-beat successfully.