A Virtual System for Measurements and Analysis of the Respiratory Sounds for Diagnosis of Respiratory System

Respiratory problem is one of the most common health problems occurring in Saudi Arabia due to the continuous changes of the weather in addition to surface winds that cause dust during all seasons in the year. This problem affects most people and especially children and elderly in addition to the adults who have respiratory problems such as asthma. This is one of the problem that need emergency care as soon as it occurred. The goal of our research is to develop a compact respiratory diagnostic system using advanced signal processing that can be used remotely via the virtual instrumentation technology to help accurately diagnosis at early stages of respiratory diseases. It can also overcome the lack of expert physicians in rural regions and some urban clinics or health centers. The proposed system will be implemented using virtual instrumentation (VI) that consists of computer, microphone with simple analog circuit, digitizer and LabVIEW software (National Instruments Inc.). VI has been designed for easy measurement and analysis. In addition to that, it has features and ability to control the whole system of acquisition, play, display, processing and advanced analysis of the different acquired respiratory signals. Respiratory signals obtained from our system are analyzed for diagnosis purposes using advanced signal processing techniques in time and frequency domains in addition to the analysis of respiratory parameters. The obtained results can be printed in a report format including acquired respiratory signal, filtered signal, extracted segment for selection of phase, power spectral density, and analyzed respiratory parameters as a reference for diagnosis purpose. The developed system has been tested with real respiratory signals of normal and abnormal cases that proved to be efficient system while dealing with many respiratory problems conditions.