A Wrist-worn Respiration Monitoring Device using Bio-Impedance

In the US alone, 22 million individuals suffer from obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), with 80% of the cases symptoms undiagnosed. Hence, there is an unmet need to continuously and unobtrusively monitor respiration and detect possible occurrences of apnea. Recent advancements in wearable biomedical technology can enable the capture of the periodicity of the heart pressure pulse from a wrist-worn device. In this paper, we propose a bio-impedance (Bio-Z)-based respiration monitoring system. We establish close contact with the skin using gold e-tattoos with a 35 mm by 5 mm active sensing area. We extracted the respiration from the wrist Bio-Z signal leveraging three different techniques and showed that we can detect the start of each respiration beat with an average root mean square error (RMSE) less than 13% and mean error of 0.3% over five subjects.