Extraction of a Respiration Rate from ECG Signal using Discrete Wavelet Transform during Exercise

: Respiration Rate is a vital parameter which gives an indication about person’s normal and abnormal respiratory illness. Respiratory activity is obtained directly utilizing strain gauge or piezoelectric transducer attached to the subject’s chest or abdomen, nasal thermistor to quantify nasal air pressure, spirometer, plethysmography & Impedance pneumotachometry etc. These direct methods which can be used to measure respiration rate but they have certain drawbacks. They can’t be used in all conditions like ambulatory monitoring, stress condition and also during sleeping condition. The noble aim behind this paper is to extract respiratory information from ECG signal using Discrete Wavelet Transform during Exercise. In that, subjects performing exercise on treadmill according to Bruce protocol upto 9 minute. This method decomposes ECG signal upto 10 th level to produce a signal similar to the original respiratory signal & reconstruct the detail components to estimate respiratory signal. The algorithm results were compared to the actual respiration signal using thermistor. The results show that algorithm is able to reconstruct the respiratory waveform