7Breaths is an application to make measuring the respiratory rate clinically (i.e. by a person watching) easy.

Medical dogma says that the respiratory rate must be measured over 1 minute. We wonder if this can be challenged. It is common practise to sample over 30 or even 15 seconds and then multiply up. But the accuracy is going to be very dependant on the actual respiratory rate. I.e. slow rates will have higher errors with 15 second samples.

We wondered if measuring over a fixed number of breaths (maybe 7) will account for these differences in sampling. So this app has been put out there in the first instance to collect lots of data over the full one minute sampling. We can then use that data to determine if counting just 7 breaths works.

We are grateful to everyone that volunteers and helps us with this project.