Abstract:
Incorporating real time health monitoring systems
in a non-restrictive way, can significantly improve an individual’s
quality of life in the treatment of sleep disorders. This paper
suggests a novel system for non-wearable, cost effective measurement
of breathing and heart-beat during sleep state. The
measurement system is composed of flexible multi-piezoelectric
elements to acquire the pressure fluctuations persuade by respiratory
movement and heart-beat when the subject is lying on it. By
employing filters with predefined frequency bands, the breathing
and heart-beat waveforms were extracted. The capturing of
breathing & heart-beat counts was performed by normalizing
the extracted waveforms using Wavelet Transform (WT) followed
by Fuzzy Logic principles. Further, in the evaluation of nonbreathing
time intervals, the amplitude changes in the extracted
breathing waveforms were considered over its sleep event. Several
experiments were conducted in order to evaluate the performance
of the system on above criteria, along with a commercially
available system. The experimental results suggest that the
proposed method can measure and extract the related waveforms
of breathing and heart-beat successfully.
