A wearable 12-lead ECG acquisition system with fabric electrodes

Abstract

Continuous electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring is significant for prevention of heart disease and is becoming an important part of personal and family health care. In most of the existing wearable solutions, conventional metal sensors and corresponding chips are simply integrated into clothes and usually could only collect few leads of ECG signals that could not provide enough information for diagnosis of cardiac diseases such as arrhythmia and myocardial ischemia. In this study, a wearable 12-lead ECG acquisition system with fabric electrodes was developed and could simultaneously process 12 leads of ECG signals. By integrating the fabric electrodes into a T-shirt, the wearable system would provide a comfortable and convenient user interface for ECG recording. For comparison, the proposed fabric electrode and the gelled traditional metal electrodes were used to collect ECG signals on a subject, respectively. The approximate entropy (ApEn) of ECG signals from both types of electrodes were calculated. The experimental results show that the fabric electrodes could achieve similar performance as the gelled metal electrodes. This preliminary work has demonstrated that the developed ECG system with fabric electrodes could be utilized for wearable health management and telemedicine applications.

Application of Convolutional Neural Network for Decoding of 12-Lead Electrocardiogram from a Frequency-Modulated Audio Stream (Sonified ECG)

“…The accuracy issues are majorly related to signal quality, given that the accuracy of remote ECG monitoring systems heavily relies on the quality of the ECG signals captured and transmitted from the patient to the monitoring center. Advancements in sensor technology [ 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 82 ], signal processing algorithms [ 83 , 84 ], and noise reduction techniques [ 81 , 85 , 86 ] have improved signal quality, leading to more accurate ECG interpretations. The more leads used, the more noise and false positive alarms emerge, and therefore ECG monitoring is usually limited to one- to three-lead settings with unconventional electrode placement [ 74 , 84 , 85 , 86 , 87 , 88 ].…”

“…Nevertheless, 12-lead ECG is the clinical standard for cardiac diagnosis based on detailed ECG waveform segmentation and rule-based cardiologist interpretations. Therefore, some studies applied advanced techniques for increasing the amount of informative leads, such as reconstruction of some standard leads and asynchronous ECG acquisition from several anatomic positions [ 77 , 87 , 89 ]; and the use of advanced wearable devices with multiple sensing electrodes embedded in chest rings or patches [ 75 , 76 ] and fabric electrodes in T-shirts [ 79 , 80 ]. Recent studies demonstrate 12-lead ECG systems for home use with facilitated and individually deformable placement of the sensors [ 76 , 81 ].…”

Smart Shirts for Monitoring Physiological Parameters: Scoping Review

“…Table 4 presents all the different sensors identified across all prototype design studies. [32,57,60,[67][68][69]78,80,88,105,118] 8 (16) Respiratory only [31,42,47,51,79,87,104] 2 (4) Electromyography only [38,103] 27 (54) Numerous signals [3,22,[24][25][26]33,34,36,37,39,40,44,50,58,59,77,80,86,99,102,113,114,120]…”

“…Types and prevalence of the physiological sensors used in prototype studies (categories not exclusive; N=81) ,25,26,[32][33][34]36,37,40,50,57,59,60,68,71,77,78,80,86,[88][89][90]99,102,105,113,118,120] …”

Adaptive Electrocardiogram Enhancement in Strong Noise Environment

“…Wearable ECG acquisition devices, which are comfortable to wear and have no time limitation, can achieve long-term monitoring. For instance, both GTWN from Georgia Institute of Sensorws [3] and T-shirt with 12-lead fabric electrodes from Zhang [4] are typical wearable devices. However, motion artifact (MA) is overlapped with ECG in the frequency domain and results in ECG misdiagnosis.…”