ThermSense: Smartphone-based Breathing Sensing Platform using Noncontact Low-Cost Thermal Camera
This work addresses the need for non-invasive breathing monitoring for psychological and physical wellbeing, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing thermal sensing methods.
The authors tackled the problem of contact-free breathing sensing by developing ThermSense, a smartphone-based platform using a low-cost thermal camera, which achieved scalable and flexible respiratory measurements for applications like stress monitoring and respiration training.
The ability of sensing breathing is becoming an increasingly important function for technology that aims at supporting both psychological and physical wellbeing. We demonstrate ThermSense, a new breathing sensing platform based on smartphone technology and low-cost thermal camera, which allows a user to measure his/her breathing pattern in a contact-free manner. With the designed key functions of Thermal Voxel Integration-based breathing estimation and respiration variability spectrogram (RVS, bi-dimensional representation of breathing dynamics), the developed platform provides scalability and flexibility for gathering respiratory physiological measurements ubiquitously. The functionality could be used for a variety of applications from stress monitoring to respiration training.