BreathFinder: A Method for Non-Invasive Isolation of Respiratory Cycles Utilizing the Thoracic Respiratory Inductance Plethysmography Signal

Benedikt Holm,1 Michal Borsky,1 Erna S Arnardottir,2,3 Marta Serwatko,2 Jacky Mallett,1 Anna Sigridur Islind,1 María Óskarsdóttir1 1Reykjavik University, School of Technology, Department of Computer Science, Reykjavik, Iceland; 2Reykjavik University, School of Technology, Sleep Institute, Reykjavik, Iceland; 3Landspitali, The National University Hospital of Iceland, Reykjavik, IcelandCorrespondence: Benedikt Holm, Email [email protected]: The field of automatic respiratory analysis focuses mainly on breath detection on signals such as audio recordings, or nasal flow measurement, which suffer from issues with background noise and other disturbances. Here we introduce a novel algorithm designed to isolate individual respiratory cycles on a thoracic respiratory inductance plethysmography signal using the non-invasive signal of the respiratory inductance plethysmography belts.Purpose: The algorithm locates breaths using signal processing and statistical methods on the thoracic respiratory inductance plethysmography belt and enables the analysis of sleep data on an individual breath level.Patients and Methods: The algorithm was evaluated against a cohort of 31 participants, both healthy and diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea. The dataset consisted of 13 female and 18 male participants between the ages of 20 and 69. The algorithm was evaluated on 7.3 hours of hand-annotated data from the cohort, or 8782 individual breaths in total. The algorithm was specifically evaluated on a dataset containing many sleep-disordered breathing events to confirm that it did not suffer in terms of accuracy when detecting breaths in the presence of sleep-disordered breathing. The algorithm was also evaluated across many participants, and we found that its accuracy was consistent across people. Source code for the algorithm was made public via an open-source Python library.Results: The proposed algorithm achieved an estimated 94% accuracy when detecting breaths in respiratory signals while producing false positives that amount to only 5% of the total number of detections. The accuracy was not affected by the presence of respiratory related events, such as obstructive apneas or snoring.Conclusion: This work presents an automatic respiratory cycle algorithm suitable for use as an analytical tool for research based on individual breaths in sleep recordings that include respiratory inductance plethysmography.Keywords: respiratory analysis, breath detection algorithm, sleep analysis, breath segmentation, respiratory cycle isolatio

Socio-Technical Interplay in a Two-Sided Market: The Case of Learning Platforms

The rise of the platform era changes the way interactions are structured and enables transactions at a distance. The platform phenomena also enables co-creation of content, shifting the way services are delivered across diverse boundaries. This is especially apparent in workplaces, where the developments change roles, relationships and conditions for teaching and learning, creating the possibility of a two-sided market. From a socio-technical and socio-cultural learning perspective, this study primarily aims for a better understanding of platforms in higher educational settings. Using a learning platform as an illustrative case, we argue for platform context transactions that are not monetary transactions. The main contribution of the paper is to offer a discussion where we problematize the transactional concept in two-sided markets. The findings shed new light on emerging challenges and tensions in the interplay between the constant change of technology and what it means to work in such change. This has implications for both teaching and learning and offers insights that can be valuable for understanding the shift to online learning during the recent pandemic of covid-19.</p