Automatic quality assessment of a forced expiratory manoeuvre acquired with the tablet microphone

Evaluation of lung function is central to the management of chronic obstructive respiratory diseases. It is typically evaluated with a spirometer by a specialized health professional, who ensures the correct execution of a forced expiratory manoeuvre (FEM). Audio recording of a FEM using a smart device embedded microphone can be used to self-monitor lung function between clinical visits. The challenge of microphone spirometry is to ensure the validity and reliability of the FEM, in the absence of a health professional. In particular, the absence of a mouthpiece may allow excessive mouth closure, leading to an incorrect manoeuvre. In this work, a strategy to automatically assess the correct execution of the FEM is proposed and validated. Using 498 FEM recordings, both specificity and sensitivity attained were above 90%. This method provides immediate feedback to the user, by grading the manoeuvre in a visual scale, promoting the repetition of the FEM when needed.

Keywords

Lung function monitoring Smart device Signal quality

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/16656

Citation

Almeida, R., Pinho, B., Jácome, C., Teixeira, J. F., Amaral, R., Gonçalves, I., Lopes, F., Pinheiro, A. C., Jacinto, T., Paixão, C., Pereira, M., Marques, A., & Almeida Fonseca, J. (2020). Automatic Quality Assessment of a Forced Expiratory Manoeuvre Acquired with the Tablet Microphone. Em J. Henriques, N. Neves, & P. de Carvalho (Eds.), XV Mediterranean Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing – MEDICON 2019 (pp. 1394–1398). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31635-8_170