Heart Monitor Using Flexible Capacitive ECG Electrodes

Heart rate monitoring is the predominant quantitative health indicator of a newborn in the delivery room. A rapid and accurate heart rate measurement is vital during the first minutes after birth. Clinical recommendations suggest that electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring should be widely adopted in the neonatal intensive care unit to reduce infant mortality and improve long term health outcomes in births that require intervention. Novel non-contact electrocardiogram sensors can reduce the time from birth to heart rate reading as well as providing unobtrusive and continuous monitoring during intervention. In this work we report the design and development of a solution to provide high resolution, real time electrocardiogram data to the clinicians within the delivery room using non-contact electric potential sensors embedded in a neonatal intensive care unit mattress. A real-time high-resolution electrocardiogram acquisition solution based on a low power embedded system was developed and textile embedded electrodes were fabricated and characterised. Proof of concept tests were carried out on simulated and human cardiac signals, producing electrocardiograms suitable for the calculation of heart rate having an accuracy within ±1 beat per minute using a test ECG signal, ECG recordings from a human volunteer with a correlation coefficient of ~ 87% proved accurate beat to beat morphology reproduction of the waveform without morphological alterations and a time from application to heart rate display below 6 s. This provides evidence that flexible non-contact textile-based electrodes can be embedded in wearable devices for assisting births through heart rate monitoring and serves as a proof of concept for a complete neonate electrocardiogram monitoring system.

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Electric potential sensing can be used in place of traditional AgCl electrodes to record high quality ECG signals without the need for electrolytic pastes or location specific sensor application [ 19 ]. Previous work using the EPS has shown that it can be used to provide a rapid and reliable ECG reading from a young infant [ 20 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Characterisation of Textile Embedded Electrodes for Use in a Neonatal Smart Mattress Electrocardiography System

Dore

Aviles-Espinosa

Luo

et al. 2021

“…To achieve high electrode density and high signal integrity, a distributed and shared amplifier (DSA) architecture is proposed by [ 40 ], which enables an in-situ amplification of the myoelectric signal with a fourfold increase in EMG electrode density. In the latest research, Gao et al [ 16 ] fabricated a flexible capacitive electrode with a flexible signal conditioning circuit on a polyimide substrate, using Boise Idaho FleX™ ASOPA4002, the customized flexible operational amplifier from American Semiconductor company, whose CMOS devices are ultra-thin (less than 40 µm) and completely flexible. Through the electrical performance test, the response to the known analog ECG signal and the human body test, it is confirmed that the signal conditioning circuit made of the operational amplifier made of the flexible device is equivalent to the traditional rigid device.…”

Section: Bioelectric Signal Monitoringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recent Progress in Flexible Wearable Sensors for Vital Sign Monitoring

Liu

Bai

et al. 2020

With the development of flexible electronic materials, as well as the wide development and application of smartphones, the cloud, and wireless systems, flexible wearable sensor technology has a significant and far-reaching impact on the realization of personalized medical care and the reform of the consumer market in the future. However, due to the high requirements for accuracy, reliability, low power consumption, and less data error, the development of these potential areas is full of challenges. In order to solve these problems, this review mainly searches the literature from 2008 to May 2020, based on the PRISMA process. Based on them, this paper reviews the latest research progress of new flexible materials and different types of sensors for monitoring vital signs (including electrophysiological signals, body temperature, and respiratory frequency) in recent years. These materials and sensors can help realize accurate signal detection based on comfortable and sustainable observation, and may likely be applied to future daily clothing.

“…The on-screen fingerprint sensor is one successful example of such a TSP-mounted bionic sensor [ 3 ]. Especially, a considerable number of attempts for implementing heart-rate sensors into mobile devices including smart phones, smart watches, and other wearable devices have been made in recent years [ 8 , 9 , 11 , 12 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ]. Portable heart-rate sensors are extremely helpful to perceive and prevent cardiac disorders like arrhythmia [ 19 , 20 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, they require both light transmitter and receiver, which necessitate a substantial amount of power and a dedicated space to be implemented. An alternative way is the electrocardiogram (ECG) that can detect the electrical charges induced by cardiac cycles [ 9 , 17 , 22 , 23 ]. The ECG requires multiple electrical contacts onto human bodies, making the system somewhat complex and bulky.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Capacitive Heart-Rate Sensing on Touch Screen Panel with Laterally Interspaced Electrodes

Kim

Song

Jung

et al. 2020

It is demonstrated that the heart-rate can be sensed capacitively on a touch screen panel (TSP) together with touch signals. The existing heart-rate sensing systems measure blood pulses by tracing the amount of light reflected from blood vessels during a number of cardiac cycles. This type of sensing system requires a considerable amount of power and space to be implemented in multi-functional mobile devices such as smart phones. It is found that the variation of the effective dielectric constant of finger stemming from the difference of systolic and diastolic blood flows can be measured with laterally interspaced top electrodes of TSP. The spacing between a pair of non-adjacent top electrodes turns out to be wide enough to distinguish heart-rate signals from noises. With the aid of fast Fourier transform, the heart-rate can be extracted reliably, which matches with the one obtained by actually counting heart beats on the wrist.