A wearable device for continuously monitoring the
respiratory rate of a patient, comprises three inertial sensors (10, 11, 12), the first inertial sensor (10) is positioned on the
abdomen (13), the second inertial sensor (11) is positioned on the
thorax (14), and the third inertial sensor (12) is positioned on a part of the body (15) not subject to
respiratory movements, fixed with respect to thetorso. Each inertial sensor (10, 11, 12) comprises an
accelerometer, a
magnetometer, and a
gyroscope. Each inertial sensor (10, 11, 12) comprises a
microprocessor (21) connected to the
accelerometer,
magnetometer, and
gyroscope. The
microprocessor (21) is connected to a
transmitter (22) and is configured to process the signals and supply to the
transmitter (22) a
signal represented by a quaternionthat describes the orientation of the three inertial sensors with respect to the Earth's reference
system. A
receiver (30) connected to a control centre (31) is configured to receive the abdominal
quaternion of the first inertial sensor, the thoracic
quaternion of the second inertial sensor, and the reference
quaternion of the third inertial sensor and is configured to send them to the control centre (31). The control centre (31) is configured to process the quaternions received, so that the abdominal quaternion and the thoracic quaternion will be referenced to the reference quaternion. The control centre (31) comprises a band-pass
adaptive filter (55, 56) that filters the signals represented by the abdominal quaternion and by the thoracic quaternion to eliminate the residual components linked to the movements of the patient. The control centre (31) is configured to calculate the
respiratory rate from the signals represented by the filtered abdominal quaternion and the filtered thoracic quaternion.