Continuous monitoring of breathing activity plays a major role in detecting and classifying\na breathing abnormality. This work aims to facilitate detection of abnormal breathing syndromes,\nincluding tachypnea, bradypnea, central apnea, and irregular breathing by tracking of thorax\nmovement resulting from respiratory rhythms based on ultrasonic radar detection. This paper\nproposes a non-contact, non-invasive, low cost, low power consumption, portable, and precise\nsystem for simultaneous monitoring of normal and abnormal breathing activity in real-time using an\nultrasonic PING sensor and microcontroller PIC18F452. Moreover, the obtained abnormal breathing\nsyndrome is reported to the concerned physicianâ??s mobile telephone through a global system for\nmobile communication (GSM) modem to handle the case depending on the patientâ??s emergency\ncondition. In addition, the power consumption of the proposed monitoring system is reduced\nvia a duty cycle using an energy-efficient sleep/wake scheme. Experiments were conducted on\n12 participants without any physical contact at different distances of 0.5, 1, 2, and 3 m and the\nbreathing rates measured with the proposed system were then compared with those measured by a\npiezo respiratory belt transducer. The experimental results illustrate the feasibility of the proposed\nsystem to extract breathing rate and detect the related abnormal breathing syndromes with a high\ndegree of agreement, strong correlation coefficient, and low error ratio. The results also showed that\nthe total current consumption of the proposed monitoring system based on the sleep/wake scheme\nwas 6.936 mA compared to 321.75 mA when the traditional operation was used instead. Consequently,\nthis led to a 97.8% of power savings and extended the battery life time from 8 h to approximately\n370 h. The proposed monitoring system could be used in both clinical and home settings.
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