An ECG monitoring system using conductive fabric

In this work we evaluated the quality of the ECG signals obtained from conductive fabric dry electrodes. The purpose of this work was to evaluate if lead I ECG collected with dry conductive fabric electrodes is suitable for applications where no special preparation of electrodes specific for ECG monitoring is allowed. An example of such application is ECG-assisted blood pressure (BP) monitoring device where the user of the BP device should only follow standard procedures of BP measurements. In this paper, we present a system that we developed for the acquisition of ECG signals and their transfer to the PC, and we evaluate the quality of the ECG signals from different electrodes placed at biceps and wrist or touched by fingers. In our experiments we compared signals obtained using gel Ag/AgCl, dry contact electrodes made of golden plates and conductive fabric-based electrodes. Conductive fabric-based electrodes are capable of collecting ECG with accuracy comparable to the accuracy of the signal collected by gel electrodes.