Toward the use of temporary tattoo electrodes for impedancemetric respiration monitoring and other electrophysiological recordings

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel temporary tattoo electrode (TTE) technology for real-time respiration monitoring via impedance measurements, emphasizing its stability, reusability, and potential for large-scale production in electrophysiological applications.

Contribution

The work presents a new design of TTEs with a robust interconnection strategy, enabling stable, long-term, and repositionable electrophysiological recordings on skin.

Findings

TTEs maintain performance under stretching and over 96 hours.

The interconnection strategy ensures stable contact with external devices.

Proof of concept demonstrated for respiration and other bio-electric signals.

Abstract

Development of dry, ultra-conformable and unperceivable temporary tattoo electrodes (TTEs), based on the ink-jet printing of PEDOT:PSS on top of commercially available temporary tattoo paper, has gained increasing attention as a new and promising technology for electrophysiological recordings on skin. In this work we present a TTEs epidermal sensor for real time monitoring of respiration through transthoracic impedance measurements, exploiting a new design based on the application of soft screen printed Ag ink and magnetic interlink, that guarantees a repositionable, long term stable and robust interconnection of TTEs with external docking devices. The efficiency of the TTE and the proposed interconnection strategy under stretching (up to 10%) and over time (up to 96 hours) has been verified on a dedicated experimental setup and on humans, fulfilling the proposed specific application of transthoracic impedance measurements. The proposed approach makes this technology suitable for large-scale production and suitable not only for the specific use case presented, but also for real time monitoring of different bio-electric signals, as demonstrated through specific proof of concept demonstrators.