Practical Acoustic Energy-Based Estimation of Inhalation Flow Rate for Asthma Monitoring

The estimation of inhalation flow rate (IFR) using acoustic devices has recently received attention. While existing work often assumes that the microphone is placed at a fixed distance from the acoustic device, this assumption does not hold in real settings. This leads to poor estimation of the IFR since the received acoustic energy varies significantly with the distance. Despite the fact that the acoustic source is passive and only one microphone is used, we show in this paper that the distance can be estimated by exploiting the inhaler actuation sound, generated when releasing the medication. Indeed, this sound is used as a reference acoustic signal which is leveraged to estimate the distance in real settings. The resulting IFR estimation is shown to be highly accurate (R2 = 80.3%). © 2020 IEEE.