Continual Monitoring of Respiratory Disorders to Enhance Therapy via Real-Time Lung Sound Imaging in Telemedicine

• Published in: Electronics (Basel) 2024-05, Vol.13 (9), p.1669
• Main Authors: Muhammad, Murdifi, Li, Minghui, Lou, Yaolong, Lee, Chang-Sheng
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Accuracy; Acoustic properties; Acoustics; Airway management; Assessments; Asthma; Biometrics; Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; Computer architecture; Design optimization; Digital imaging; Image reconstruction; Internet of Things; Lung diseases; Lungs; Medical research; Medicine, Experimental; Microelectromechanical systems; Microphones; Monitoring systems; Noise monitoring; Obstructions; Patient compliance; Patients; Real time; Remote monitoring; Remote sensing; Respiration; Respiratory diseases; Sensors; Sound; Stethoscopes; Telemedicine; Therapy
• ISSN: 2079-9292; 2079-9292
• DOI: 10.3390/electronics13091669

This work presents a configurable Internet of Things architecture for acoustical sensing and analysis for frequent remote respiratory assessments. The proposed system creates a foundation for enabling real-time therapy and patient feedback adjustment in a telemedicine setting. By allowing continuous remote respiratory monitoring, the system has the potential to give clinicians access to assessments from which they could make decisions about modifying therapy in real-time and communicate changes directly to patients. The system comprises a wearable wireless microphone array interfaced with a programmable microcontroller with embedded signal conditioning. Experiments on the phantom model were conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of reconstructing acoustic lung images for detecting obstructions in the airway and provided controlled validation of noise resilience and imaging capabilities. An optimized denoising technique and design innovations provided 7 dB more SNR and 7% more imaging accuracy for the proposed system, benchmarked against digital stethoscopes. While further clinical studies are warranted, initial results suggest potential benefits over single-point digital stethoscopes for internet-enabled remote lung monitoring needing noise immunity and regional specificity. The flexible architecture aims to bridge critical technical gaps in frequent and connected respiratory function at home or in busy clinical settings challenged by ambient noise interference.