Abdominal breathing by using an intelligent tutoring system

With the growing number of aging population, abdominal breathing (AB) as a health-promoting exercise has claimed wide human interest. Especially in Asia, AB becomes a friendly practice in traditional medicine, for instance, a gentle spiritual exercise of Tai Chi Chuan , a combination of breathing exercise, relaxation and meditation of Chi Kung , and different yoga-type breathing patterns. Most of experienced mentors advise learners memorizing AB step by step. However, it is hard to retrieve for learners to practice AB by themselves. Within this paper, we present an iso-volume maneuver (IVM) tutoring system based on learning by doing for subjects to learn AB. During the IVM, subjects focus on the abdominal wall movement, and remember the AB pattern by observing respiratory signals in this system. The IVM tutoring system also measures the respiratory signals by respiratory inductive plethysmography and calculates the energy proportion of abdominal wall movement signals (Eawm) to evaluate the performance of AB learning. The higher Eawm represents the more correct practicing AB. A 50 subjects’ experiment which divided subjects into IVM and non-IVM groups (learning AB with step by step instructions) is introduced in this study. Results indicate that IVM group has significant higher Eawm (59.5±6.0%) than the non-IVM group (51.6±10.4%). Therefore, the IVM group performs better AB than the non-IVM group. We conclude that the IVM tutoring system is efficient for individual to learn AB.