Spray‐Coated, Magnetically Connectable Free‐Standing Epidermal Electrodes for High Quality Biopotential Recordings

Abstract

The acquisition of biopotentials from the surface of the human body is an important and common procedure that is extremely useful both in the clinical practice and in non‐clinical applications such as sport monitoring and human‐machine interfaces. To avoid the employment of bulky recording systems and to allow optimal long‐term measurements, recently tattoo‐like electrodes were developed, aiming at obtaining high‐quality signals while at the same time maximizing the comfort of the subject. The ability to seamlessly contact epidermal electrodes is of paramount importance for ensuring both these objectives and represents one of the biggest challenges in this field. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient way to fabricate free‐standing conductive/ferrimagnetic PEDOT:PSS‐based epidermal electrodes by employing a convenient spray coating technique. This approach takes full advantage of the “bioelectronics bag of tricks” and offers a new methodology to tackle the problem of epidermal electrodes interfacing. The proposed electrodes are in fact fabricated using a conductive polymeric ink deposited through a large‐area technique and can be easily transferred onto the skin, where they can be conveniently contacted by means of magnetic connectors without disrupting their conformability. These electrodes have been employed with excellent results for the detection of different biopotentials, namely electrocardiogram, electromyogram and electro‐oculogram, and demonstrated very good performance for the detection of biosignals from body parts, such as the face, where standard pre‐gelled electrodes are not ideal, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach for the development of a new generation of functional films suitable for critical biopotentials monitoring.This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.