1 École de Technologie Supérieure (ÉTS), Université du Québec, Montréal, QC H3C 1K3, Canada.
2 SIG.NUM Preemptive Healthcare, Inc., Montréal, QC H3K 1G6, Canada.
3 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University, Montréal, QC H3G 1M8, Canada.

Contactless Capacitive Electrocardiography Using Hybrid Flexible Printed Electrodes.

Sensors (Basel). 2020 Sep 10; 20(18):

Authors: Lessard-Tremblay M, Weeks J, Morelli L, Cowan G, Gagnon G, Zednik RJ

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.

PMID: 32927651 [PubMed - in process]