A Step Towards Design and Validation of a Wearable Multi-Sensory Smart-Textile System for Respiration Monitoring

Among many advancements in wearable technology, there is a strong demand to develop wearable smart textiles for respiration monitoring in daily life settings. The existing respiration monitoring methods are insufficient to monitor respiration events continuously in real-life settings and are not validated extensively. Motivated by this need, we developed a wearable multi-sensory e-textile system called “RespWear” for accurate and reliable respiration monitoring in daily life settings. RespWear consists of a textile pressure sensor belt to monitor the chest movements due to breathing and a wearable data acquisition system. The sensor belt is connected to a microcontroller which supports wireless communication to create a completely wearable and wireless system. The data collected from the sensor belt was sent to an edge computing device via ESP-Now for feature extraction and respiration rate analysis. We recruited 4 participants (2 female and 2 male) to validate the RespWear for monitoring different respiration rates (number of breaths per minute) and different postures (standing, sitting, bending, reclining). An OptiTrack IR camera system was used as a gold standard to validate RespWear performance. Our results showed that RespWear had an excellent correlation (r-value = 0.836) with the data collected using the OptiTrack camera system for the respiration rate calculation. These validation results proved that the RespWear was a good candidate for being a wireless, wearable respiration monitoring system in daily life settings.