Work

Contactless Capacitive Electrocardiography Using Hybrid Flexible Printed Electrodes

Year: 2020

Type: article

Abstract: Traditional capacitive electrocardiogram (cECG) electrodes suffer from limited patient comfort, difficulty of disinfection and low signal-to-noise ratio in addition to the challenge of integrating them in wearables. A novel hybrid flexible cECG electrode was developed that offers high versatility in the integration method, is well suited for large-scale manufacturing, is easy to disinfect in clinical settings and exhibits better performance over a comparable rigid contactless electrode. The novel flexible electrode meets the frequency requirement for clinically important QRS complex detection (0.67-5 Hz) and its performance is improved over rigid contactless electrode across all measured metrics as it maintains lower cut-off frequency, higher source capacitance and higher pass-band gain when characterized over a wide spectrum of patient morphologies. The results presented in this article suggest that the novel flexible electrode could be used in a medical device for cECG acquisition and medical diagnosis. The novel design proves also to be less sensitive to motion than a reference rigid electrode. We therefore anticipate it can represent an important step towards improving the repeatability of cECG methods while requiring less post-processing. This would help making cECG a viable method for remote cardiac health monitoring.

Source: Sensors

DOI: 10.3390/s20185156

Authors: Mathieu Lessard-Tremblay, Joshua Weeks, Laura Morelli, Glenn Cowan, Ghyslain Gagnon, Ricardo J. Zednik

Institutions: École de Technologie Supérieure, Concordia University

Language: English

Topic: Non-Invasive Vital Sign Monitoring

Subfield: Biomedical Engineering

Field: Engineering

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,112