Breathing Signal Fusion in Pressure Sensor Arrays

Pressure sensors can be used to unobtrusively obtain breathing signals from a person in bed. Obtaining a single representation of the breathing signal from an array of such sensors requires data-level fusion. We propose a decision directed adaptive linear estimator to perform this fusion online. The proposed method was compared with three other online fusion methods and two offline methods using one hundred data records collected from five healthy participants. The decision directed adaptive linear estimator had signal to noise ratios comparable to the offline correlation method that it was adapted from and better mutual information results. In the presence of movement noise and for low amplitude signals, the proposed method also provides good fusion performance.