A MEMS seismometer respiratory monitor for work of breathing assessment and adventitious lung sounds detection via deep learning

Physicians evaluate a patient's respiratory health during a physical examination by visual assessment of the work of breathing (WoB) to determine respiratory stability, and by detecting abnormal lung sounds via lung auscultation using a stethoscope to identify common pathological lung diseases, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and pneumonia. Since these assessment methods are subjective, a low-profile device used for an accurate and quantitative monitoring approach could provide valuable preemptive insights into respiratory health, proving to be clinically beneficial. To achieve this goal, we have developed a miniature patch consisting of a sensitive wideband multi-axis seismometer that can be placed on the anatomical areas of a patient's lungs to enable an effective quantification of a patient's WoB and lung sounds. When used on a patch, the seismometer captures chest wall vibrations due to respiratory muscle effort, known as high-frequency mechanomyogram (MMG), during tidal breathing as well as seismic pulmonary-induced vibrations (PIVs) during deep breathing due to normal and/or adventitious lung sounds like crackles, while simultaneously recording respiration rate and phase. A system comprised of multiple patches was evaluated on 124 patients in the hospital setting and shown to accurately assess and quantify a patent's physical signs of WoB by measuring the average respiratory effort extracted from high-frequency MMG signals, demonstrating statistical significance of this method in comparison to clinical bedside observation of WoB and respiration rate. A data fusion deep learning model was developed which combined the inputs of PIVs lung sounds and the corresponding respiration phase to detect crackle, wheeze and normal breath sound features. The model exhibited high accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision and F1 score of 93%, 93%, 97%, 93% and 93% respectively, with area under the curve (AUC) of precision recall (PR) of 0.97 on the test set. Additionally, the PIVs with corresponding respiration phase captured from each auscultation point generated an acoustic map of the patient's lung, which correlated with traditional lung radiographic findings.