Last Updated on April 5, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
For practicing breath meditation, it is helpful to know you breath rate. Peter Charlton, British Heart Foundation Research Fellow in the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, at the University of Cambridge:
https://peterhcharlton.github.io/
says, a normal breath rate is between 12 – 20 breath per minute. Peter Charlton has developed a “A Toolbox of Respiratory Rate Algorithms”:
https://peterhcharlton.github.io/info/RRest
as well as the Matlab toolbox for respiratory rate:
https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/55289-respiratory-rate-estimation
Paper who do respiratory rate estimation use devices similar to the iWorx TA220. This is a 3 lead gold standard ECG for HR measurement device which can be bought on on ebay for $1.398,99:
https://www.ebay.ch/itm/185245471492
The device is a shop keeper at ebay since a long time, nobody buys the device. For the iWorx TA220 to work, we additionally need the iWorx ECG toolbox which costs another 1000 USD extra. But which meditators have this setup at home to practice breath meditation. Eventually Peter H. Charlton? His setup is also suitable in the hospital do tetermin vital signs. Is the patient still alive or already death? We can use this setup to answer this question, and we suppose it is clinically validated.
Sadhguru in India teaches breath meditation to his students. It can be found in countless videos on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sadhguru++breath+
But will Sadhguru’s students buy Peter Charltons setup with a Matlab toolbox to practice breath meditation, and can they afford it? The most affordable way to measure the breath rate is a Garmin Fenix 6 watch paired to a chest strap. But according to our own little experience, the Garmin setup is only accurate at 12 breath per minute. Are there no other devices and toolboxes?
Talha Iqbal, Research Associate at University of Galway, Ireland:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/talha-iqbal-550aa186/?originalSubdomain=ie
showed on his YouTube channel, how the respiration rate can be calculated from R-R and P-P peaks:
To get R-R peak data, we don t need a iWorx TA 220, we can also take a Polar H10 chest strap with the Polar sensor logger app:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.j_ware.polarsensorlogger&hl=de
The Polar H10 chest strap is gold standard for HR measurements for activities with strong body movements:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31004219/
But for weak body movement as for instance breath meditation an iWorx TA 220 is more accurate than the Polar H10 chest straps. That is what we suppose if we read papers from the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio about consumer grade heart rate monitors. But we think a Polar H10 chest strap and Talha Iqbals YouTube demos will do it for Sadhguru’s students to measure their respiration rate.
But is it accurate? We suppose the main reason why a Garmin Fenix 6 watch who can measure respiration rate is inaccurate is because it is not calibrated. How to calibrate the respiration rate can be found in Peter Charltons GITHUB io documentation:
https://peterhcharlton.github.io/info/RRest
But do Sadhguru’s students know this documentation? If not, a YouTube demo about it would be helpful. There are data sets available to calibrate the respiration rate to make it accurate. From this information, it should be possible to get an accurate respiration rate from a Polar H10 chest strap for Sadhguru’s students. We don’t need a iWorkx TA220 and Matlab. This you only need if you are in the hospital and want to find out if you are still alive or already dead.
Does How To Electronics from India read this journal? If so, can he do a YouTube demo about it? Or is it too complicated for How to Electronics viewers and the students of Sadhguru? For us also, since although we are interested in this method to calculate accurately the respiration rate from a Polar H10 chest strap in Python, we don’t use it, since we did not go through all the steps in detail. This takes time, which we don’t have.