SpiroMask: Measuring Lung Function Using Consumer-Grade Masks
This addresses the need for accessible lung health monitoring for people with respiratory illnesses, though it is incremental as it adapts existing sensor technology to masks.
The paper tackled the problem of continuous lung health monitoring by retrofitting a microphone into consumer-grade masks to measure lung function, achieving estimation of lung volume and respiration rate within the American Thoracic Society's approved error range on 48 participants.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), 235 million people suffer from respiratory illnesses and four million people die annually due to air pollution. Regular lung health monitoring can lead to prognoses about deteriorating lung health conditions. This paper presents our system SpiroMask that retrofits a microphone in consumer-grade masks (N95 and cloth masks) for continuous lung health monitoring. We evaluate our approach on 48 participants (including 14 with lung health issues) and find that we can estimate parameters such as lung volume and respiration rate within the approved error range by the American Thoracic Society (ATS). Further, we show that our approach is robust to sensor placement inside the mask.