Development of a Real-Time Chest Wall Motion Analysis Device

Abstract

When patients having respiratory related diseases such as acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) lung volume decrease is the major cause for dyspnea In clinics the regional chest wall motion is often used for the diagnosis of lung function because it reflects the regional lung volume changes The purpose of this study is to develop a real-time device for monitoring chest wall motion using the flex sensors so as to provide the medical personnel a device to observe the continuous changes of lung volume Multiple sensors are integrated into a belt for placing on the chest and abdominal wall During the respiration the proposed system may receive the angle information derived from the impedance change which is sent from the microprocessor All the angle information will then be used for reconstructing the contour of chest wall using B-Spline method In this study two experiments including the static and dynamic measurements are performed for system evaluation In static experiment sensing belt is placed on several known shapes of plates for accuracy and repeatability analysis In dynamic experiment three sensing belts are firstly attached on a male subject chest wall Then a pneumotachometer is employed for simultaneously measuring the respiratory flow An algorithm proposed by Konno and Mead is modified for obtaining the best correlation coefficients that relates the cross section change to volume change From the experimental results the static measurements show that the accuracy is about 90% with the standard deviation within 3% In dynamic measurements the proposed device is demonstrated to be feasible for continuously displaying the chest wall changes during respiration In summary this study develops a volume calibration based device for monitoring the regional motion of chest wall

Date of Award	2018 Sept 3
Original language	English
Supervisor	Kuo-Sheng Cheng (Supervisor)