A Practical Study to Enhance Pressure Signal Quality in Mechanical Ventilators Using Moving Average Filtration: A Comparative Study

Undesirable noise and interference present a substantial obstacle in the process of obtaining biomedical signals for analysis and diagnosis. It is necessary to reduce the noise and enhance signal quality for many designs of medical devices such as Mechanical Ventilators (MV), patient monitors and overall biosignal processing. To contribute for addressing this problem, and for medical applications such as MV which are used for critical diseases such as pneumonia, COVID 19 etc. This paper, conducted comparative study to evaluate the performance of a 3-point Moving Average Filter (MAF) and a 5-point MAF in order to reducing noise and improving signal quality in MVs which are used in medical applications. MATLAB was utilized to perform filter approximation, realization and analysis. LabVIEW was employed for pressure signal data acquisition, implementation, and Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) calculation. Experimental data, which needed for filters implementation, were obtained by running a MV connected to an artificial lung and a reference device which is used to measure pressure signal. In general, 3 point presented better SNR against 5 points MAF for pressure signal required in MVs. This approach can potentially enhance healthcare quality by providing better quality of biomedical signals which are used in medical devices.