A Pilot Study on Wearable Nasal Patch Sensor for Assessment of Breathing Parameters

The use of variable sensors for the monitoring of respiratory parameters has gained popularity over the recent years. Patch based electronic sensors are newly emerged state of the art sensing methods in which the user is directly augmented with technology. Advances in patch electronic sensors along with broad availability of smartphones, cloud and wireless systems has empowered wearable technology for a huge impact on digital and personal health care. This pilot study proposes a context recognition method using sensor data obtained from one and both nostrils simultaneously. An electronic nasal patch- based sensor module is developed to asses breathing patterns. The first level prototype developed using NTC thermistor was found to be compact and efficient towards recording inhalation and exhalation rates, respiration rate and different breath parameters such as volume and max flow rate. The raw data obtained from this module was processed for removal of base line drift and noise using a mean smoothed windowed. Therefore, the low thermistor driven patch sensing mechanism helped in measuring inhalation and exhalation processes effectively. In this pilot study we have obtained the mean, median and standard deviation values for different breathing parameters. The statistical parameters indicate the presence of variation between inhalation and exhalation breathing patterns.