Assessment of cardio-respiratory rates by non-invasive measurement methods in hospitalized preterm neonates

Noncontact monitoring of physiological signs in preterm infants is necessary in order to increase neonatal comfort and open new possibilities to home respiration monitoring. The presented solution is obtained by using commercially available digital web camera (WeC) and Eulerian video magnification (EVM) algorithm which amplify the small changes on the sequence of the recorded images, that would be invisible to the naked eye. With this method, the respiration rate (RR) is extracted as the dominant frequency in the thorax portion of the patient, and the heart rate (HR) by observing minor color changes of the skin. The results obtained are compared with the signal from standard multi-parameter monitor (MM). Data collected on 7 patients demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed measurement method. The measure of RR and HR show close correlation with the data from the MM, with a root mean square error of 12.2 for the HR and 7.6 for the RR. This technique can be a valuable non-contact monitoring system for the improvement of clinical care in NICU and may represent a potential application in home health monitoring.