Respirogramme : prototype de respirographe intelligent - Prothia - PPE 2012

Even if a person has thorax movement, it doesn't mean that he/she is breathing since it is possible that no airflow is going into his/her lungs. However most of the breathing monitoring or respirogram nowadays are based on the thorax movements recording thanks to the impedance. Based on that fact, the company Prothia asked us to make a proof of concept on a respirogram that uses temperatures at the nostrils and mouth in order to determine if the patient is breathing properly.

The goal being in the end do develop a respirogram coupled with an analysis software that will help doctors diagnose breathing problems on a patient and in the end launch a monitoring system that will in real time analyze the breathing and alarm the medical personnel in case of problem.

In order to do so we designed two parts. The first one is an analysis software that would analyze the breathing curves and find "abnormal events" and that have an easy genuine user interface in order to easily identify such events and make a diagnose. The designed analysis was based on a breathing model involving several features such as the breathing frequency, amplitude or regularity. The second part is a recording device that allows capturing the data needed to analyze the breathing state of the patient.

These two parts can communicate in two ways: either directly using a serial connection, thus storing the data straight into a computer, or indirectly by storing the data from the recording device into a SD card.

These concepts have been implemented for the software part in Java using different APIs. The recording device was done on a development board LV24-33A from MikroElektronika that was connected to a board containing the thermistors used to take the data. The embedded software has been developed in C language on the MikroC PRO for dsPIC.

This project was quite big and due to problems in components the analysis part was not implemented indeed the temperature board was completed late in the year...