A new real-time and precision capnography for human respiration carbon dioxide concentration.

This paper is a description of the designing of a new mainstream device to measure human respiration carbon dioxide concentration, based on non-dispersive infrared (NDIR) absorption technology. The device can be used to accurately monitor the cardiopulmonary status during anaesthesia and mechanical ventilation in real time. This new device can not only make up the error of real-time gas measurement of the side-stream device, but also make up the accuracy of the main-stream device. In the paper, four issues which can affect the measurement accuracy were considered: respiration gas flow, turbulence of the light source with all ranges of wavelength, temperature drift and signal noise. The experimental results showed that the device could produce a stable output signal and deviation of measurement accuracy could be achieved to within 4%.