Respiration monitoring by using ECG

Electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG) is an image of the electrical activity of heart which is formed as line tracings on paper. ECG helps the trained physicians to diagnose the status of the heart. The objective of this work is to utilize cardio generated voltages for respiratory study. This work analyses real-time ECG formed from standard lead systems to extract respiration rate of lungs. The job will be performed with the ECG dataset available at physionet.org, an internet database bank. An algorithm in (Matrix Laboratory) MATLAB environment is developed for extraction of the exact amplitudes of the R-waves and furthermore, these R-wave amplitudes are used to form pulsatile waves due to respiration. The respiration wave is then used to evaluate the respiration rate of the heart. This matches completely with the respiration information of the same subject/patient. Thus this analysis will help the person who has already gone through the ECG test to know about his respiration rate without going any further diagnosis.