TY - GEN
T1 - Estimation of Respiratory Rate from Breathing Audio
AU - Harvill, John
AU - Wani, Yash
AU - Alam, Mustafa
AU - Ahuja, Narendra
AU - Hasegawa-Johnsor, Mark
AU - Chestek, David
AU - Beiser, David G.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 IEEE.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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U2 - 10.1109/EMBC48229.2022.9871897
DO - 10.1109/EMBC48229.2022.9871897
M3 - Conference contribution
C2 - 36085895
AN - SCOPUS:85138128092
T3 - Proceedings of the Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBS
SP - 4599
EP - 4603
BT - 44th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC 2022
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 44th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC 2022
Y2 - 11 July 2022 through 15 July 2022
ER -