Comparison of Active Electrode Materials for Non-Contact ECG Measurement.

Shun Peng,Ke Xu,Wei Chen

doi:10.3390/s19163585

Abstract

For long-term and more convenience electrocardiograph (ECG) monitoring, an active- electrode-based ECG monitoring system, which can measure ECG through clothes, is proposed in this paper. The hardware of the system includes active electrodes, signal processing and data transmission modules and the software mainly includes a denoising algorithm based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD). Then the proposed system was verified using the comparison of the ECG signals measured synchronously by active electrodes and Ag/AgCl electrodes. In addition, three flexible materials, including conductive textile, copper foil tape and a flexible printed circuit (FPC) are developed for the sensing layer with active electrodes. To compare the performance of these three materials for the sensing layer, the ECG signals of 10 subjects were measured by different materials in three postures and several indexes for quality evaluation were calculated. Results show that effective and clear ECG waveforms can be measured by all three kinds of materials and the quality of ECG signals measured by FPC is the best by conducting a significant t-test for signal quality indexes of three materials.

Highlights

The ECG signal is one of the most commonly used signals in clinical examination
This paper mainly introduces a system for ECG measurement through clothes, and further proposes some comparison among different active electrode materials
To verify the system proposed, active electrodes were fixed onto the front of the body of the subject with straps to measure the ECG signal, with the reference signal measured by using the Ag/AgCl electrode synchronously

Summary

Introduction

The ECG signal is one of the most commonly used signals in clinical examination It can reflect normal cardiac electrical activity and diagnose heart-related diseases, such as atrial and ventricular hypertrophy, premature beats and atrial fibrillation 1Malik1996Heart. Passive electrodes, such as Ag/AgCl electrodes, are widely used in conventional ECG measurements. While passive electrodes can help obtain ECG signals with good quality, they have many limitations [1]. Skin preparation such as removing thick hair and the cuticle of the skin is required [2]. The above limitations of conventional ECG measurement systems restrict their development towards long-term and daily monitoring [6]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion