TinyML Implementation for a Textile-Integrated Breath Rate Sensor

Clothes that quietly listen to your breath might be the missing link between hospital‑grade vigilance and everyday comfort. We walk through how our team built a textile‑integrated breath sensor that actually works in the wild—embroidered interconnects, 3D‑printed dielectric islands, and a carbonized‑silicon yarn strain gauge stitched into a belt—then taught it to estimate breathing at the edge with TinyML.

We dig into the engineering choices that matter: why flexible interconnects are the “holy grail” for wearables, how a simple peak detector falls apart with drift and burn‑in, and what it takes to turn raw strain signals into reliable features. After screening public datasets that didn’t match our sensor, we built our own: band‑pass filtering in the 0.1–1 Hz range, three‑second windows, normalization, and event‑button labeling for clean ground truth. From there, we used Edge Impulse’s EON Tuner to search architectures and landed on two contenders—a CNN on time‑domain windows and a compact DNN with wavelet features—then deployed both on an STM32L4 with DMA, timers, and CMSIS‑DSP preprocessing.

The results are candid and practical. The CNN was slower but consistently more accurate and robust; the DNN was snappier with lower power but less reliable under offset and noise. Models trained on a different sensor’s data struggled to generalize to our belt, reinforcing a core lesson for smart textiles: sensor‑specific datasets and fine‑tuning are essential. We close by mapping next steps—expanding our dataset, improving transfer across garments and users, exploring hydration prediction, and tightening on‑device optimization—so remote patient monitoring can be seamless, private, and wearable all day.

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