Browsing by Author "Ranta, Mika"

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  • Respiratory rate detection from a force signal
    (2010) Ranta, Mika
     School of Science | Master's thesis
    Respiratory rate is an important vital sign and a convenient method for its measurement could have important applications in the medical field. An algorithm is presented to calculate the respiratory rate of a patient from a force signal recorded from under the mattress in a hospital bed. The algorithm uses autocorrelation to segment the force signal into a sequence of potential breaths. The similarity of consecutive segments is evaluated according to a set of similarity parameters. If a long enough sequence of segments with strong similarities is found, it is used to calculate the respiratory rate. The algorithm was tested with simulated data and recorded human data and the effects of the parameters on performance were evaluated. The algorithm was found to produce adequate results and several avenues for its improvement were discovered.