On the Entropy of a Sigh 

Purpose: What is the purpose of... sigh... Oh wait, this research is actually about the purpose of a "sigh." But take a deep breath, because that's exactly what our rodent friends did for days to prepare the dataset analyzed in this research. Only these mice had genetic variants that influenced how much (or little) a sigh had on changing the entropy of their breathing behavior. If that sounds either strange or interesting, I invite you to read the paper, which is currently prepared as a pre-print on arXiv. This work was done while I was a volunteer in the Breathing Research and Therapeutics (BREATHE) center at the University of Florida (UF).  

If you want to follow up, please contact Alexandria Marciante at the BREATHE center at the University of Florida! Honestly, it was a pleasure working with her and I give her the highest regards. 

Summary: While a graduate student at the University of Florida, I completed this project independently as the final assignment for Biosignals and Biosystems Analysis class course (Spring of 2023). Below you can see an example of the time-series dataset collected for this project. That represents plethysmography (PLETH) data for a rat (lovely little things). Zooming in you can see different kinds of breaths - some normal, others representing deep sighs.  

The paper is far more interesting, though to illuminates a basic insight - the "entropy" of certain breath statistics (think of it as the "randomness" of certain traits) changes after the rats take a deep sigh (see the E# metrics in the image below). The question, while preliminary, is whether the a sigh helps to "reset" certain breathing characteristics, and if the impact of this sigh varies between rats with varying genetic conditions. The following figure shows how a variety of breathing metrics change before and after a sigh. Here, the x axis represents the breath number (centered about a sigh), where each axis shows the metric of interest. 

Source Code: The software was implemented in Jupyter Notebooks. 

Dataset: The dataset is from the Breathing Research and Therapeutics (breath) center at the University of Florida.