Software Tool for Analysis of Breathing-Related Errors in Transthoracic Electrical Bioimpedance Spectroscopy Measurements

During the last decades, Electrical Bioimpedance Spectroscopy (EBIS) has been applied in a range of different applications and mainly using the frequency sweep-technique. Traditionally the tissue under study is considered to be timeinvariant and dynamic changes of tissue activity are ignored and instead treated as a noise source. This assumption has not been adequately tested and could have a negative impact and limit the accuracy for impedance monitoring systems. In order to successfully use frequency-sweeping EBIS for monitoring time-variant systems, it is paramount to study the effect of frequency-sweep delay on Cole Model-based analysis. In this work, we present a software tool that can be used to simulate the influence of respiration activity in frequency-sweep EBIS measurements of the human thorax and analyse the effects of the different error sources. Preliminary results indicate that the deviation on the EBIS measurement might be significant at any frequency, and especially in the impedance plane. Therefore the impact on Cole-model analysis might be different depending on method applied for Cole parameter estimation.