Impact of Skin–Electrode Interface on Electrocardiogram Measurements Using Conductive Textile Electrodes

Physicians´ understanding of biosignals as measured with medical instruments becomes the foundation of their decisions and diagnoses of patients, as they rely strongly on what the instruments show. Thus, it is critical and very important to ensure that the instruments´ recordings exactly reflect what is happening in the patient´s body so that the acquired signal is the real one or at least as close to the real in-body signal as possible. This is such an important issue that sometimes physicians use invasive measurements to obtain the real biosignal. Generating an in-body signal from what a measurement device shows is called “signal purification” or “reconstruction” and can be done only when we have adequate information about the interface between the body and the monitoring device. In this paper, first, we present a device that we developed for electrocardiogram (ECG) acquisition and transfer to PC. To evaluate the performance of the device, we use it to measure ECG and apply conductive textile as our ECG electrode. Then, we evaluate ECG signals captured by different electrodes, specifically traditional gel Ag/AgCl and dry golden plate electrodes, and compare the results, allowing us to investigate if ECG measured with the device is proper for applications where no skin preparation is allowed, such as ECG-assisted blood pressure monitoring devices. Next, we propose a method to reconstruct the ECG signal from the signal acquired by our device, with respect to the interface characteristics and their relation to the ECG. The interface in this paper is skin-electrode interface for conductive textiles. In the last stage of this paper, we explore the effects of pressure on skin-electrode interface impedance and its parametrical variation.