S-Mask: An Interactive Smart Face Mask for Breathing Exercises

Stress and anxiety have become prevalent issues in today's society, exacerbated by the challenges of modern life. Deep breathing is an effective technique for reducing stress and anxiety. However, without proper feedback, its effectiveness may be limited, especially for beginners. To address this challenge, we designed an interactive smart face mask, named S-Mask, which can recognize a user's breathing patterns and provide real-time feedback during the breathing exercises. S- Mask hardware includes an embedded board equipped with a temperature sensor to detect and process respiration signals. Also, the real-time operating system FreeRTOS is adopted to coordinate multiple tasks running on the embedded board, such as sensor reading, breathing pattern recognition, and Bluetooth communication. An interactive mobile app is developed to guide users to complete the breathing exercises. In our experiment, 30 volunteers were invited to evaluate the responsiveness, accuracy, and usability of S-Mask. Our results show that S-Mask can achieve a 99.7% accuracy rate of breath recognition and has a response time of less than 200ms. The user interface is easy to use and can help users complete the breathing exercises efficiently.