Multifunctional, breathable MXene-PU mesh electronic skin for wearable intelligent 12-lead ECG monitoring system

Abstract

With the advent of an aging society and increasing concern for cardiovascular health, comfortable long-term electrocardiographic (ECG) monitoring systems in daily life are much in demand. If the system can give real-time feedback on cardiovascular status and offer timely personalized advice like doctors, it will be beneficial to promote cardiovascular health and alleviate the imbalance of medical resources. Herein, we report a multifunctional, conformal, and air-permeable electronic skin (e-skin) based on MXene-Polyurethane mesh (MPM). When used as ECG electrodes, the e-skin shows ultra-low electrode–skin contact impedance (4.68 kΩ at 1 kHz), high signal-to-noise ratio (16.5 dB), and high breathability (2.1838 kg/m2/day), and can be continuously worn for at least 7 days. As a strain sensor, the e-skin exhibits a large measurement range (>40 %) and unique segmental sensitivity (GF = 172.54 in 0 ∼ 18.64 % and 79.38 in 18.64 ∼ 50 %), which is suitable for detecting both subtle and large physiological signals. More significantly, by combining the MPM e-skin with a flexible printed circuit board (FPCB) and a merged convolutional neural network & long-short-term memory (CNN & LSTM) intelligent algorithm, the acquired wearable intelligent e-skin system can realize daily 12-hour 12-lead ECG monitoring with diagnostic accuracy over 99 % for four arrhythmias. These results show that the MPM e-skin has huge potential in multifunctional intelligent healthcare systems. In particular, an intelligent ECG system similar to a “daily doctor” is proposed for daily long-term cardiovascular health monitoring.