Performance comparison of conductive textile electrodes in ECG monitoring

TL;DR

This study compares five conductive fabrics for ECG monitoring, finding that all are suitable but one performs best.

Contribution

A direct comparison of Shieldex conductive fabrics for ECG signal quality in real-world conditions.

Findings

Shieldex Silitex material provided the best ECG signal quality.

Shieldex Technik-tex P130 + B material showed the worst performance.

All tested materials were visually suitable for ECG measurements.

Abstract

The implementation of textile electrodes offers the possibility of improving comfort and reducing the risk of allergic reactions of the measured subject, while also opening the door to non-medical devices for everyday life. The main objective of the experiment is to test and compare five conductive fabrics manufactured by Shieldex in terms of the quality of the measured electrocardiography (ECG) signals. For this experiment, 3 electrodes of each conductive material were made and tested on a sample of 20 volunteers. The electrodes were attached by an elastic band at the locations of selected standardized ECG leads, and Ag/AgCl electrodes were used as reference. Correlation coefficient (R), signal-to-noice ratio (SNR) and percentage root-mean-square deviation (PRD) applied to representative cardiac periods were used to evaluate the quality of the acquired data. Differences in the results of the evaluation parameters between the different positions were noted, and when the distribution of positions was neglected, it was discovered that the best results were obtained with Shieldex Silitex material and, on the contrary, the worst results were recorded with Shieldex Technik-tex P130 + B material. It was also found that the results were not significant between the materials and after visual inspection it can be concluded that all materials are suitable for ECG measurements.

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