Medical-Grade ECG Sensor for Long-Term Monitoring

Abstract

The recent trend in electrocardiogram (ECG) device development is towards wireless body sensors applied for patient monitoring. The ultimate goal is to develop a multi-functional body sensor that will provide synchronized vital bio-signs of the monitored user. In this paper, we present an ECG sensor for long-term monitoring, which measures the surface potential difference between proximal electrodes near the heart, called differential ECG lead or differential lead, in short. The sensor has been certified as a class IIa medical device and is available on the market under the trademark Savvy ECG. An improvement from the user's perspective-immediate access to the measured data-is also implemented into the design. With appropriate placement of the device on the chest, a very clear distinction of all electrocardiographic waves can be achieved, allowing for ECG recording of high quality, sufficient for medical analysis. Experimental results that elucidate the measurements from a differential lead regarding sensors' position, the impact of artifacts, and potential diagnostic value, are shown. We demonstrate the sensors' potential by presenting results from its various areas of application: medicine, sports, veterinary, and some new fields of investigation, like hearth rate variability biofeedback assessment and biometric authentication.Sensors 2020, 20, 1695 2 of 17 have evolved into smaller and more powerful devices for recording high-quality single or multi-lead ECG, they cause discomfort for the patients because the device needs to be carried on the body with all the cabling. Furthermore, they still have limited duration of the recordings up to a maximum of 14 days. On the other hand, the (wireless) ILRs are lightweight devices (usually only around 17 g weight) implanted under the skin [5] and provide comfortable long-term ECG monitoring for up to several years. However, the ILRs are invasive devices and their capacity for ECG recording is limited to several recordings, each with a duration of a couple of minutes. Consequently, if the patient equipped with the device does not visit a medical office to retrieve the measurements in a timely manner, older recordings are overwritten.The provision of mobile health (mHealth) services, like patient monitoring in hospitals [6], remote medical support, or monitoring during sport activities, requires for these ECG devices to allow greater patient mobility than the Holter monitor [7-9] and additionally provide wireless transmission of the data from the device to a nearby personal terminal (smartphone, tablet) connected to the Internet [10]. Motivated by these challenges, we have envisioned to design a monitoring system for synchronous measurement of vital bio-signs [11,12]. Our ultimate goal was to combine minimal number of body sensors with different functions into in a single one, i.e., to develop a multi-functional body sensor. Namely, our long-term experience with MECG devices has shown us that a significant amount of information about vital functions, including ECG, can be...

Internet of Things (IoT) Based ECG System for Rural Health Care

“…Wi-Fi module ESP8266 is connected to Arduino for uploading the MQTT program [18]. ESP8266 GPI 03 pin is connected to GND.…”

Wearable Sensors for Monitoring and Preventing Noncommunicable Diseases: A Systematic Review

“…The works reported upon in this section include 24/7 systems for ECG monitoring [18][19][20], a preliminary work on person identification aiming toward zero-effort monitoring of cardiovascular diseases [21], three works aiming toward estimating BP continuously without wearing a BP cuff [22][23][24] and work on a bipolar wireless ECG monitor [25,26]. The device was later certified as a medical device, and Reference [27] reported on a number of studies conducted with the device. Furthermore, this section reports on two works focusing on extracting HRV data [28,29]: one work assessing the accuracy of the Apple watch for monitoring atrial fibrillation (AF) [30] and two works focusing on the triage of patients with cardiovascular disease [31,32].…”

Development and Test of a Portable ECG Device with Dry Capacitive Electrodes and Driven Right Leg Circuit

“…Several commercial wearable devices, such as Apple Watch (Apple Inc., Cupertino, CA, USA), Fitbit Sense (Fitbit Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA) or Withings ScanWatch (Withings, Issy-les-Moulineaux, France), are able to record a single-lead ECG using metallic dry-contact electrodes, in contrast to adhesive wet electrodes [ 10 ]. Typically, one electrode is placed on the front of the watch and can be touched with a finger, and another electrode is placed on the back, in contact with the wrist.…”