A Real Time Monitor for Evaluating Posture Change and Respiration Rate Using Image Sequence Analysis

Abstract

We develop a real time monitoring system for evaluating both frequency of posture change and respiration rate without any contact to the subject. This system detects the optical flow (apparent velocity) using a temporal-spatial local optimization method to evaluate the subject motion on a bed. The system consists of a CCD video camera, a parallel image processing board and a PC. The parallel image processing board includes 256 CPUs that calculates the optical flow of the whole image (256 × 240 pixels) within 150ms. Healthy young volunteers were participated to evaluate the system. We propose a function that includes information of respiration and body movement from the detected optical flows on the blanket area of breast. The periodic fluctuation synchronizes with the volunteer's respiration. The large peaks occur during volunteer's posture change.