Wearable Chest Sensor for Running Stride and Respiration Detection
Severin Bernhart, Eric Harbour, Ulf Jensen, Thomas Finkenzeller (2022): Wearable Chest Sensor for Running Stride and Respiration Detection In: ISEA 2022 – The Engineering of Sport 14, Purdue University.
Endurance running is among the most popular physical activities partially due to its low barriers to entry. However, some people avoid running because of respiratory distress, and respiratory monitoring could help prevent this. Wearable sensors are valuable for respiration detection during exercise and enable respiratory feedback in real-time. Therefore, this study presents a wearable chest-mounted stride and respiration sensor including step and flow reversal event detection algorithms. The algorithms were evaluated using precision and recall between detected and reference events. Precision and recall values reached 99.7% and 99.6% for step events and 91.9% and 87.0% for inspiration and expiration events, respectively. High baseline noise in the respiratory signal and an increasing sweat level decreased detection performance. With further signal-to-noise improvements, the presented sensor will consequently be a suitable wearable for use as an intelligent system to guide runners’ respiration during exercise.
