setting parameters?

New to this... but I'm trying to monitor breath inhale/exhale coming in via a mic - as the breath intensifies - goes over a certain number I'm sending a new value to processing
I want to have four stages of breathing sent to processing
gentle (past 3)
medium (past6) then send this value to processing
hard
& full on

I'm using the past object
but the breath always goes down to 0 after each exhale which resets everything into the 'gentle' section even when the breath is escalting back up to a full on hard breath

My No.1 problem is creating something that allows the patch to know when a peak is reached rather than just passing on up through the numbers

My No 2 problem is they seem to need two bangs to trigger the processing bit

Any help will be really really appreciated

No. 3 my loadmess object is no good because the number needs to be sent out constantly to processing via OSC to make my drawing work

Here's what I've got so far - ridiculously bad