Breeze

Abstract

Slow-paced biofeedback-guided breathing training has been shown to improve cardiac functioning and psychological wellbeing. Current training options, however, attract only a fraction of individuals and are limited in their scalability as they require dedicated biofeedback hardware. In this work, we present Breeze, a mobile application that uses a smartphone's microphone to continuously detect breathing phases, which then trigger a gamified biofeedback-guided breathing training. Circa 2.76 million breathing sounds from 43 subjects and control sounds were collected and labeled to train and test our breathing detection algorithm. We model breathing as inhalation-pause-exhalation-pause sequences and implement a phase-detection system with an attention-based LSTM model in conjunction with a CNN-based breath extraction module. A biofeedback-guided breathing training with Breeze takes place in real-time and achieves 75.5% accuracy in breathing phases detection. Breeze was also evaluated in a pilot study with 16 new subjects, which demonstrated that the majority of subjects prefer Breeze over a validated active control condition in its usefulness, enjoyment, control, and usage intentions. Breeze is also effective for strengthening users' cardiac functioning by increasing high-frequency heart rate variability. The results of our study suggest that Breeze could potentially be utilized in clinical and self-care activities. Sailboat In h a le P a u se E xh a le P a u se … Nose Mouth R e p e a te d a co u st ic b re a th in g se q u e n ce Fig. 1. Overview of Breeze, a mobile gamified biofeedback breathing training.

Physiological Responses and User Feedback on a Gameful Breathing Training App: Within-Subject Experiment

“…Measures that yielded significant differences were then analyzed using the pairwise Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Compared with a previous work [31], we provide detailed physiological analyses in this study using all collected measures, consistent with established approaches [4].…”

“…In a previous work, we introduced the gameful biofeedback breathing training Breeze [31] (Figure 1). In this study, we assessed the feasibility of detecting breathing patterns, that is, the biosignal, which is the first essential aspect of such breathing training.…”

“…The app uses a microphone to detect the different breathing phases (inhalation, exhalation, and pause). The algorithm is described in Shih et al [31].…”

ViBreathe: Heart Rate Variability Enhanced Respiration Training for Workaday Stress Management via an Eyes-Free Tangible Interface

“…As shown in Figure 2, breathing guidance can be presented in single or multiple sensory modalities. Most single-modal breathing guidance relies on visual displays, which could take a variety of forms, such as an accurate guiding wave (Park et al, 2009), an evocative metaphorical visualization (Yu et al, 2017), a playful animation or game (Shih et al, 2019;Sonne & Jensen, 2016), or an immersive light environment . Auditory breathing guidance usually employs a simple audio tone (Clark & Hirschman, 1990;Gavish, 2010) and nature sounds (Ettehadi et al, 2020) or uses musical elements (Leslie et al, 2019;.…”

Breath Sounds as a Biomarker for Screening Infectious Lung Diseases

“…In [1], measuring lung function is achieved by calculating the exhaled flow rate from the smartphone microphone. In [4], sequence classification models such as Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) variations are used to identify breath cycles followed by feedback. In [5], respiratory sounds are classified using adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference systems and artificial neural networks using the power spectrum density PSD as a feature.…”