i-PRExT: Photoplethysmography Derived Respiration Signal Extraction and Respiratory Rate Tracking Using Neural Networks

Noninvasive monitoring of respiratory activity is an emerging research area in biomedical health monitoring. This article describes a neural network-based model, intelligent Photoplethysmography derived Respiration signal Extraction, and Tracking (i-PRExT). Here, an ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) is used to select the appropriate intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) through filtering in the respiration band and reconstruct by a linear weighted sum to obtain the photoplethysmography derived respiration (PDR) signal. The weight factors are derived by a multilayer perceptron neural network (MLPNN) fed with respiratory induced amplitude variation (RIAV) features extracted by a deep autoencoder (DAE). The tracking of respiration rate (RR) is done by an adaptive filter-based predictor. i-PRExT was tested and validated with BIDMC data set under PhysioNet and 30 volunteers' data collected under resting condition. The PDRs achieved over 90% correlation and low error (NRMSE~0.2) with reference respiration signal, while RRs have almost 100% correlation even under motion artifact (MA) corrupted photoplethysmography (PPG). The PDR shows improved performance, while RR tracking outperforms the published research on respiration signal extraction based on PPG.