當病人罹患肺部疾病例如「急性呼吸窘迫症」時，肺容積下降是導致他們呼吸困難的主要原因。在臨床方面，經常使用胸廓局部變化來診斷肺功能，因胸廓能反映出局部的肺容積狀態。本研究目的在於開發一套可以即時監測胸廓局部變化的裝置，提供醫療人員觀察患者肺容積連續變化的狀態，此裝置是應用多個彎曲感測器製作成綁帶，以便放置於病患的胸廓，當病患呼吸時，此系統會收到從微處理器傳來的電阻變化所轉換成之角度資訊，再將角度資訊應用B-Spline方法重建胸廓曲線。測試實驗分為靜態與動態實驗；在靜態實驗方面，將綁帶放置於已知形狀之物體外圍，以評估其準確性及再現性。在動態實驗方面，則將三條綁帶放置於一位男性受測者胸廓上，同步使用流量計量測呼吸流量，參考Konno與Mead等人所提出演算法，利用從監測裝置得到的截面積變化與流量計得到的體積變化找出最佳的體積測量關係係數。從實驗結果顯示，在靜態分析中本研究所開發之裝置可達90%準確性，其標準差最高僅為3%；在動態實驗中，重建出的曲線確實會隨著呼吸變化。總結，本研究提出一種可基於體積校準並可評估胸廓局部變化的監測裝置。

When patients having respiratory related diseases such as acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), lung volume decrease is the major cause for dyspnea. In clinics, the regional chest wall motion is often used for the diagnosis of lung function because it reflects the regional lung volume changes. The purpose of this study is to develop a real-time device for monitoring chest wall motion using the flex sensors, so as to provide the medical personnel a device to observe the continuous changes of lung volume. Multiple sensors are integrated into a belt for placing on the chest and abdominal wall. During the respiration, the proposed system may receive the angle information derived from the impedance change, which is sent from the microprocessor. All the angle information will then be used for reconstructing the contour of chest wall using B-Spline method. In this study, two experiments including the static and dynamic measurements are performed for system evaluation. In static experiment, sensing belt is placed on several known shapes of plates for accuracy and repeatability analysis. In dynamic experiment, three sensing belts are firstly attached on a male subject chest wall. Then, a pneumotachometer is employed for simultaneously measuring the respiratory flow. An algorithm proposed by Konno and Mead is modified for obtaining the best correlation coefficients that relates the cross section change to volume change. From the experimental results, the static measurements show that the accuracy is about 90% with the standard deviation within 3%. In dynamic measurements, the proposed device is demonstrated to be feasible for continuously displaying the chest wall changes during respiration. In summary, this study develops a volume calibration based device for monitoring the regional motion of chest wall.

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