Estimation of Respiratory Rate from Breathing Audio

John Harvill, Yash Wani, Mustafa Alam, Narendra Ahuja, Mark Hasegawa-Johnsor, David Chestek, David G. Beiser

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has fueled exponential growth in the adoption of remote delivery of primary, specialty, and urgent health care services. One major challenge is the lack of access to physical exam including accurate and inexpensive measurement of remote vital signs. Here we present a novel method for machine learning-based estimation of patient respiratory rate from audio. There exist non-learning methods but their accuracy is limited and work using machine learning known to us is either not directly useful or uses non-public datasets. We are aware of only one publicly available dataset which is small and which we use to evaluate our algorithm. However, to avoid the overfitting problem, we expand its effective size by proposing a new data augmentation method. Our algorithm uses the spectrogram representation and requires labels for breathing cycles, which are used to train a recurrent neural network for recognizing the cycles. Our augmentation method exploits the independence property of the most periodic frequency components of the spectrogram and permutes their order to create multiple signal representations. Our experiments show that our method almost halves the errors obtained by the existing (non-learning) methods. Clinical Relevance- We achieve a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 1.0 for the respiratory rate while relying only on an audio signal of a patient breathing. This signal can be collected from a smartphone such that physicians can automatically and reliably determine respiratory rate in a remote setting.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication44th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC 2022
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages4599-4603
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781728127828
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Externally publishedYes
Event44th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC 2022 - Glasgow, United Kingdom
Duration: Jul 11 2022Jul 15 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBS
Volume2022-July
ISSN (Print)1557-170X

Conference

Conference44th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityGlasgow
Period7/11/227/15/22

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Signal Processing
  • Health Informatics
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Biomedical Engineering

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Estimation of Respiratory Rate from Breathing Audio'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this