Erden, FatihÇetin, A. Enis2018-04-122018-04-122016http://hdl.handle.net/11693/37749Date of Conference: 26-28 November 2015Conference Name: 9th International Conference on Electrical and Electronics Engineering, ELECO 2015Respiratory rate is an essential parameter in many practical applications such as patient and elderly people monitoring. In this paper, a novel contact-free system is introduced to detect the human breathing activity. The system, which consists of two pyro-electric infrared (PIR) sensors, is capable of estimating the respiratory rate and detecting the sleep apnea. Sensors' signals corresponding to the thoracic movements of a human being are sampled using a microprocessor and analyzed on a general-purpose computer. Sampled signals are processed using empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and a new average magnitude difference function (AMDF) is used to detect the periodicity and the period of the processed signals. The resulting period, by using the fact that breathing is almost a periodic activity, is monitored as the respiratory rate. The new AMDF provides a way to fuse the data from the multiple sensors and generate a more reliable estimation of the respiratory rate.EnglishGeneral purpose computersInfrared detectorsSignal processingAverage magnitude difference functionElderly peopleEmpirical mode decompositionHuman breathingInfra-red sensorMultiple sensorsPeriodic activityRespiratory rateSignal detectionConference Paper10.1109/ELECO.2015.7394631