A Wearable Mobile Electrocardiogram Measurement Device With Novel Dry Polymer-Based Electrodes
A Wearable Mobile Electrocardiogram Measurement Device With Novel Dry Polymer-Based Electrodes
A Wearable Mobile Electrocardiogram Measurement Device With Novel Dry Polymer-Based Electrodes
I.
INTRODUCTION
379
TENCON 2010
fault.
A. .Design of Novel Dry Foam Electrode
A novel dry foam electrode was proposed and applied for
wearable ECG acquisition device. In view of this, the
proposed dry foam electrode, as shown in Fig. 2, was
designed to contact the skin with an electrically polymer
conductive foam with the compression set about 5~10 %,
which was made by urethane material. They were covered
with a 0.2 mm-thick taffeta material made electrically
polymer conductive fabric (conductive about 0.07
ohm/squares) and coating with Ni/Cu on all surfaces to
establish an electrical contact similar to that of the dry silver
electrodes. A 0.2 mm layer of Au was used as an adhesion
layer. The size of our dry foam electrode is 14(L) x 8(W) x
8(H) mm. With the prototypes of our dry foam electrodes
fabricated in hands, ECG measurements are conducted on
the participant. Our dry foam electrode can adapt to the skin
topography, and guarantees small relative motion of the
skin to electrode because of its flexibility and cushioning
effect.
The following are major advantages of our dry foam
electrode for long-term ECG measurement: the skinelectrode contact area and skin properties between each
subject are directly related to the skin-electrode impedance.
The contact area should be increased to keep lower
impedance. When the electrodes are attached on the hairy
skin site, the contact area will obviously reduced because
the thickness of hairs will increase the gap between the skin
and electrode. However, the proposed dry foam electrode,
made by the conductive foam, can provide a good softness
property to fit the skull shape. On the hairy site, it can fill
the spacing between the hairs to increase the skin-electrode
contact area. By applied the slight force on the electrode to
ensure the prefect contact of dry foam electrode on the skin,
the effect approaches to the wet electrode on the hairless
skin. Our dry foam electrode can maintain the contact even
under motion, and rubbing and sliding of the electrode on
the skin, to reduce the motion artifact more effectively.
Physician and
other staffs
Physician
GSM network
Internet
Mobile phone
with ECG monitoring
Healthcare center
computer
GSM modem
Healthcare server
380
Fig. 2(a) Top view, (b) Exploded view of our proposed dry foam ECG
electrode. The foam electrode was covered by the conductive fabric on all
surfaces and then paste on a Au layer.
Fig. 3(a) Block diagram and (b) photograph of ECG acquisition module
.
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Algorithm
in
IV.
ECG
1) Signal-Quality Check
The pre-test experiment for signal-quality check was
illustrated in Fig. 6. The aim of this experiment was to
understand distortion caused by our dry foam electrode
under ECG measurement. First, ECG data was pre-recorded
by using standard wet ECG electrodes, and stored in the
personal computer. Next, the ECG data was fed into a
programmable function generator and passed through a
voltage divider to generate the simulated human ECG
signal. The simulated ECG signal was further fed to our dry
foam electrode, and then amplified by the ECG device.
After recording the amplified ECG signal, it was compared
with the pre-recorded ECG data. From the high correlation
between the pre-recorded ECG and ECG obtained our dry
foam electrode, it can present the cleanness of ECG signal
recorded by our dry foam electrode. Fig. 9 showed the prerecorded ECG signal and its counterparts recorded by our
proposed dry foam electrode. It showed that the correlation
between pre-recorded ECG signal and the signal obtained
by our dry foam electrode is high (99.51 %). The result
confirms the cleanness of our dry foam electrode from
artifacts.
GUI
ULIST
GSM network
STGSM thread
2) Impedance Measurement
No
GSM Modem
Yes
RECV thread
No
Yes
Physicians
mobile phone
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Fig. 7 (a) frequency characteristic of our proposed dry foam electrodes. (b)
impedance variation of dry foam electrode and conventional wet electrode
under long-term ECG measurement.
383
REFERENCES
[1]
CONCLUSIONS
384