Non-Contact Monitoring of Preterm Infants Using RGB-D Camera

In this study, we present a medical imaging method to estimate the preterm infant respiratory rate with a non invasive embedded RGB-D sensor. The respiratory rate is derived by measuring morphological chest wall movements with a depth sensor. The performances of our method are evaluated by comparing the values of respiratory rate measurements obtained using our method with those resulting from a standard reference device, used as a benchmark. Experimental results showed that the proposed method can correctly measure the respiratory rate in preterm infants and activates an alarm signal when respiratory rate values go out of the physiological range or when the infant remains stationary for a long time. As future development, the project can be used as multi-purpose non invasive test on movements and their symmetry or on the infants’ ability to correctly inflate.