Towards Continuous Respiration Rate Detection While Walking

Respiration rate is a vital sign to predict cardiac arrest, apnea, dyspnea and lung ailments. Past research has largely focused on sensing respiration rate in a controlled environment with participants at rest. But disease prognosis requires continuous everyday-life monitoring of respiration rate. In this work, we demonstrate how CO2 sensor placed inside N95 mask can detect respiration rate during motion as well as rest with a better or comparable performance compared to previous work. Our system weighs 16 grams, runs uninterrupted for 2 hours, generalises across participants, does not require any learning algorithm and is reproducible.