Along with the development of personalized health care, the demand for miniturized or low cost medical devices is increasing. In order to realize a long term monitoring of breathing rate and thus diagnose the sleeping or breathing disorders, an ultra low cost breathing rate recording card (BRC) adopting the easily available typeT thermocouple as temperature sensor was developed, following the concept of dark casket in flight so as to separate the data recording and unscrambling procedures. The BRC system allowed to record and evaluate afterwards the breathing temperature data and time information via a more convenient and durable way. Through the contrast experiment on breathing rate detection between BRC and commercial Agilent Data Acquisition System, it was demonstrated that the breathing rate information could be easily obtained by the BRC and displayed on the computer screen via the USB interface. This study provides a significant and realistic technical approach for low cost breathing diagnostics.
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