OptiBreathe: An Earable-based PPG System for Continuous Respiration Rate, Breathing Phase, and Tidal Volume Monitoring

Abstract

In the continuous quest to push the boundaries of mobile healthcare and fitness tracking, monitoring respiratory biomarkers emerges as a pivotal frontier. In this paper, we present OptiBreathe, a lightweight on-device earable system designed to decode the respiratory modulations within photoplethysmography (PPG) signals. OptiBreathe computes three clinical respiratory biomarkers towards enabling continuous respiratory health monitoring with wearable devices. In our effort to bridge respiratory research and earable computing, we collected a first-of-its-kind dataset that empowers researchers to explore in-ear PPG alongside gold-standard spirometry-based ground truth in order to measure respir..