An Overview of Respiratory Airflow Estimation Techniques: Acoustic vs Non-Acoustic

The primary objective of this analysis to provide an overview of the respiratory airflow estimation techniques, including both acoustic and non-acoustic approaches. This paper also highlights and addresses the applications where the breathing flow estimation was found to be crucial. The detailed summary of both acoustic and non-acoustic techniques were presented. The non-acoustic methods require airflow measurement devices or sensors whereas the acoustic methods only involve processing of breath sound signals to estimate airflow. A brief discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the acoustic and non-acoustic approaches of respiratory flow estimation were included in this article. The literature discloses that current advances in computing technology provide a platform to integrate the signal processing methods and machine learning algorithms to estimate airflow non-invasively. The future studies to be extended after estimation the respiratory flow also were addressed in the paper.