Reliability of respiratory tidal volume estimation by means of ambulatory inductive plethysmography

Ambulatory monitoring of ventilatory parameters in everyday life, field research and clinical situations may offer new insights into respiratory functioning in health and disease. Recent technological advances that employ ambulatory inductive plethysmography could make monitoring of respiration outside the clinic and laboratory feasible. Inductive plethysmography provides a method for nonintrusive assessment of both timing (e.g. respiration rate) and volumetric parameters (e.g. tidal volume and minute ventilation), by which tidal volume is initially calibrated to direct measures of volume. Estimates of tidal volume assessed by this technique have been validated in laboratory investigations, usually examining within-individual relations to direct measures over a large range of tidal volume variation. However, the reliability of individual differences in tidal volume or other breathing parameters has not been tested under naturalistic measurement conditions using inductive plethysmography. We examined the test-retest reliability of respiration rate, tidal volume and other volumetric parameters of breathing over a period of six weeks of repeated measurements during baseline conditions and breathing exercises with 16 healthy freely moving volunteers in a Yoga course. Reliability of measurement was evaluated by calculating the average week-to-week between-subject correlation coefficients for each physiological measure. Additionally because body-mass index has been previously positively correlated to tidal volume, we also assessed this relationship as an external criterion of validity of tidal volume estimation. Regarding the latter, similar correlations to those previous studies were found (r = 0.6). Furthermore, reliability estimates were high and consistent across respiratory measures (typically r's = 0.7-0.8). These results suggest the validity of ambulatory inductive plethysmographic measurement of respiration, at least under relatively sedentary conditions. Findings also point to the stability of individual differences in respiratory parameters over consecutive weeks.