Abnormal dyspnea perception detection system

摘要

Apparatus and methods to test respiratory patients for altered dyspnea awareness. The device imposes a defined inspiratory resistive load (3, 24) under controlled breathing conditions and records the patient's subjective sensation of dyspnea (10, 14) over time by incrementally increasing (18, 29) the inspiratory resistive load. In a preferred embodiment, the patient breathes in a controlled manner with visual biofeedback prompting (19, 11, 14, 6), having predetermined respiratory rate, inspiration to expiration time ratio and inspiration and expiration respiratory waveforms.