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Original Paper

Indirect Skin Contact Electrocardiogram Monitoring System Using Flexible Capacitive Electrodes

Issey Takahashi^1,3, Kiyoko Yokoyama¹* and Marco Knaflitz²

¹Graduate School of Design and Architecture, Nagoya City University, 2-1-10 Kitachikusa, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya 464-0083, Japan
²Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, Politecnico di Torino, Italy
³University of Tsukuba, Japan
*E-mail address: yokoyama@sda.nagoya-cu.ac.jp

(Received April 4, 2016; Accepted March 22, 2017)

Abstract. It is gaining great importance to develop and integrate physiological sensors into daily healthcare. Especially, electrocardiogram (ECG) is useful for the disease diagnosis and daily health monitoring, also for the driver’s cognitive state monitoring. Capacitive ECG monitoring system, which enables to collect ECG with indirect skin contact, is implemented in this study. Signal attenuation and noise contamination is considered by installing flexible electrode, neutralization circuit, AC coupling circuit, Driven right leg (DRL), and DSP board in the configuration. The system is evaluated with 5 subjects with a car in situations of engine off and on. R-wave Detection Sensitivity (Se) and Positive Predictivity (P+) of 99.8% and 100% were obtained during the engine on.

Keywords: ECG, Capacitive Electrode, Daily Health Care