Contactless Vital Signs Monitoring for Animals

Zaid Farooq Pitafi, Yingjian Song, Zaipeng Xie, Benjamin M. Brainard, Wen-Zhan Song

Abstract: Monitoring vital signs, such as heart rate (HR) and respiratory rate (RR) is critical for veterinary medicine. The existing contact based systems are difficult to use on animals for longer periods as they may cause movement restriction. Contactless solutions have recently gained more popularity due to their ease-of-use. However, there are very few validated systems for animals. In this study, we propose a contactless vital signs monitoring system, CageDot for animals. Our system provides continuous real-time monitoring of HR and RR during hospitalization. The CageDot is placed under the animal cage and detects the heart vibrations using a geophone sensor. The CageDot also has a signal quality control algorithm to address the problem of obtaining high-quality cardiac data in real-life noisy environments, such as hospitals. Compared to the existing works that use controlled environments, this is especially significant. The algorithm includes several steps that include background noise/movement removal, subject movement detection, heartbeat extraction, and vital signs estimation. The experimental results on 16 hospitalized dogs and cats show that this system can achieve high accuracy for vital signs monitoring with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 4.71 for HR (3.8% error rate) and 1.28 (8% error rate) for RR.