ThermSense: Smartphone-based Breathing Sensing Platform using Noncontact Low-Cost Thermal Camera

TL;DR

ThermSense is a smartphone-based, contact-free breathing sensing platform utilizing a low-cost thermal camera, enabling scalable and flexible respiratory measurements for health and wellbeing applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel thermal voxel integration method and respiration variability spectrogram for accurate, contactless breathing analysis using smartphones.

Findings

Effective contactless breathing measurement demonstrated

Platform supports diverse health monitoring applications

Scalable and flexible for ubiquitous respiratory data collection

Abstract

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.