Abstract
Non-contact methods for the tracking of breathing have found noticeable interest in research in recent years motivated by the obtrusiveness of the traditional approach to sleep disordered breathing diagnosis. The low-priced Kinect device released by Microsoft has emerged as a possible alternative hardware in the field of subject's monitoring aimed at sleep disorders analysis.
In this paper we present a method for the reconstruction of the patient's breathing during sleep using the depth maps acquired by Kinect. Preliminary operations of resampling and denoising were performed on the images.
A reconstruction of the breathing is then obtained by means of image processing and filtering operations; it is synchronized with the corresponding polysomnographic record, features are extracted from both signals and compared. The strong likeness in the mean of the features extracted from the two records (with mean error of 0.87% in frequency and 9.17% in regularity) supports the view that enhancements of this technique may represent a valid alternative to the present approach to sleep monitoring