Non-Contact Physiological Measurement System for Wearing Masks During the Epidemic

Physiological signals indicate a person's physical and mental state at any given time. Accordingly, many studies extract physiological signals from the human body with non-contact methods, and most of them require facial feature points. However, under COVID-19, wearing a mask has become a must in many places, so how non-contact physiological information measurements can still be performed correctly even when a mask covers the facial information has become a focus of research. In this study, RGB and thermal infrared cameras were used to execute non-contact physiological information measurement systems for heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and forehead temperature for people wearing masks due to the pandemic. Using the green (G) minus red (R) signal in the RGB image, the region of interest (ROI) is established in the forehead and nose bridge regions. The photoplethysmography (PPG) waveforms of the two regions are obtained after the acquired PPG signal is subjected to the optical flow method, baseline drift calibration, normalization, and bandpass filtering. The relevant parameters in Deep Neural Networks (DNN) for the regression model can correctly predict the heartbeat and blood pressure. In addition, the temperature change in the ROI of the mask after thermal image processing and filtering can be used to correctly determine the number of breaths. Meanwhile, the thermal image can be used to read the temperature average of the ROI of the forehead, and the forehead temperature can be obtained smoothly. The experimental results show that the above-mentioned physiological signals of a subject can be obtained in 6-s images with the error for both heart rate and blood pressure within 2%∼3% and the error of forehead temperature within ±0.5°C. © 2023 Tech Science Press. All rights reserved.

Pressure Prediction System in Lung Circuit Using Deep Learning

A massive number of patients infected with SARS-CoV2 and Delta variant of COVID-19 have generated acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) which needs intensive care, which includes mechanical ventilation. But due to the huge no of patients, the workload and stress on healthcare infrastructure and related personnel have grown exponentially. This has resulted in huge demand for innovation in the field of automated health care which can help reduce the stress on the current healthcare infrastructure. This work gives a solution for the issue of pressure prediction in mechanical ventilation. The algorithm suggested by the researchers tries to predict the pressure in the respiratory circuit for various lung conditions. Prediction of pressure in the lungs is a type of sequence prediction problem. Long short-term memory (LSTM) is the most efficient solution to the sequence prediction problem. Due to its ability to selectively remember patterns over the long term, LSTM has an edge over normal RNN. RNN is good for short-term patterns but for sequence prediction problems, LSTM is preferred. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.