Accurate and continuous respiratory rate using touchless monitoring technology.

Purpose: Respiratory rate is a commonly used vital sign with various clinical applications. It serves as a crucial marker of acute health issues and any significant alteration in respiratory rate may be an early warning sign of major issues such as infections in the respiratory tract, respiratory failure, or cardiac arrest. Timely recognition of changes in respiratory rate enables prompt medical action, while neglecting to detect a change may lead to adverse patient outcomes. Here, we report on the performance of respiratory rate determined using a depth sensing camera system (RR) which allows for continuous, non-contact 'touchless' monitoring of this important vital sign.

Methods: Thirty adult volunteers undertook a range of set breathing rates to cover a target breathing range of 4-40 breaths/min. Depth information was acquired from the torso region of the subjects using an Intel D415 RealSense camera positioned above the bed. The depth information was processed to generate a respiratory signal from which RR was calculated. This was compared to a manually scored capnograph reference (RR).

Results: An overall RMSD accuracy of 0.77 breaths/min was achieved across the target respiratory rate range with a corresponding bias of 0.05 breaths/min. This corresponded to a line of best fit given by RR = 1.01 x RR - 0.22 breaths/min with an associated high degree of correlation (R = 0.997). A breakdown of the performance with respect to sub-ranges corresponding to respiratory rates or ≤7, >7-10, >10-20, >20-30, >30 breaths/min all exhibited RMSD accuracies of less than 1.00 breaths/min. We also had the opportunity to test the performance of spontaneous breathing of the subjects which occurred during the study and found an overall RMSD accuracy of 1.20 breaths/min with corresponding accuracies ≤1.30 breaths/min across each of the individual sub-ranges.

Conclusions: We have conducted an investigative study of a prototype depth sensing camera system for the non-contact monitoring of respiratory rate. The system achieved good performance with high accuracy across a wide range of rates including both clinically important high and low rates.