Non-Contact Respiration Monitoring and Body Movements Detection for Sleep Using Thermal Imaging

Abstract

Monitoring of respiration and body movements during sleep is a part of screening sleep disorders related to health status. Nowadays, thermal-based methods are presented to monitor the sleeping person without any sensors attached to the body to protect privacy. A non-contact respiration monitoring based on thermal videos requires visible facial landmarks like nostril and mouth. The limitation of these techniques is the failure of face detection while sleeping with a fixed camera position. This study presents the non-contact respiration monitoring approach that does not require facial landmark visibility under the natural sleep environment, which implies an uncontrolled sleep posture, darkness, and subjects covered with a blanket. The automatic region of interest (ROI) extraction by temperature detection and breathing motion detection is based on image processing integrated to obtain the respiration signals. A signal processing technique was used to estimate respiration and body movements information from a sequence of thermal video. The proposed approach has been tested on 16 volunteers, for which video recordings were carried out by themselves. The participants were also asked to wear the Go Direct respiratory belt for capturing reference data. The result revealed that our proposed measuring respiratory rate obtains root mean square error (RMSE) of 1.82±0.75 bpm. The advantage of this approach lies in its simplicity and accessibility to serve users who require monitoring the respiration during sleep without direct contact by themselves.

Implementation of Thermal Camera for Non-Contact Physiological Measurement: A Systematic Review

“…Another way of extracting the RR signal is to consider the movement of pixels between frames without making the nose or mouth the ROI. This method was used in the following study [ 54 ] and is more reliable when used in real time and with patients in the frame using a blanket or in a position not facing the camera. Breathing motion detection uses a subtraction technique in the background to identify motion by computing the difference between the current and previous frames.…”

“…However, the model of the tool is only listed in one of their studies [ 48 ], namely DL-231 (S&ME, Tokyo, Japan). A similar force sensor-based respiratory belt was also used by another study [ 54 ], the Go Direct Respiration Belt model. This belt is set to record ten respiration samples per second for 5400 s. This study [ 44 ] also uses a respiratory belt to obtain the reference value.…”

Noncontact Sleep Monitoring With Infrared Video Data to Estimate Sleep Apnea Severity and Distinguish Between Positional and Nonpositional Sleep Apnea: Model Development and Experimental Validation

“…However, as the model was not capable of detecting events, we used ground truth labels for this purpose [ 20 ]. Jakkaew et al [ 21 ] used a thermal camera to estimate breathing rate and body movements; however, they did not analyze the breathing pattern to identify sleep apnea, and the method was not designed to detect sleep position. Deng et al [ 22 ] used six active infrared cameras and a Kinect sensor to detect body position and breathing pattern (abnormal vs normal breathing).…”

Remote Monitoring of Patient Respiration with Mask Attachment—A Pragmatic Solution for Medical Facilities

“…The contribution of the proposed system is not only limited to the efforts used in the combat of COVID-19, but it is also applicable for use in other teams' epidemic and pandemic threats that affect the respiratory system, such as the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and Influenza A (H1N1). Furthermore, the proposed system, when compared to other noninvasive remote monitoring of RR methods such as the infrared (IR) [14] and near-infrared (NIR) [15] thermal sensing, can detect respiratory anomalies such as wheeze on top of RR monitoring. This proposed system also does not suffer from shortcomings of the aforementioned alternatives during mask wear, where important motion and heat signature from the face are covered.…”