Continuous Health Monitoring With Resonant-Microphone-Array-Based Wearable Stethoscope

This paper reports the implementation and evaluation of an array-based recognition system for the detection of wheezing in breathing. We describe the design and fabrication of a resonant microphone array for pre-filtered acoustic signal acquisition, and outline a novel signal classification algorithm that benefits from its properties. The use of a resonant-transducer array at the input simplifies several of the required digital processing steps necessary for performing spectral filtering and wheezing recognition. The recognizer system is evaluated and compared against a traditional approach, and the experimental results show that recognition processing time (and power consumption) can be reduced 11 times, specifically from 5.11 to 0.46 s. Classification experiments also indicate a robustness in recognition accuracy to low-frequency-dominated background noises such as those emitted by the heart. The findings suggest that this technique has wide-ranging applicability to low-power and self-powered wireless sensing and detection systems.