Textile Electrodes for Electrotherapy

Abstract

Electronics have been present in medicine for decades. Electrocardiography, electromyography and electrotherapy are widely applied methods. While electrodes that are used for monitoring functions are small, the size of electrodes applied in electrotherapy is rather large. The latter electrodes have to be able to supply relatively high currents to the muscles. Due to the muscle contractions caused during the stimulation, skin movement and perspiration may loosen or disrupt the electrode. To accommodate for the relative skin movement under them, the electrodes need to possess sufficient flexibility to ensure good contact to the skin and avoid irritation and skin damage. Against this background textile electrodes integrated into clothes are an attractive alternative against self-adhesive electrodes as they ensure flexibility and a good contact to the human body. In this study, commercially available self-adhesive electrodes are compared to different textile electrodes. The electrodes were placed with a distance of approximately six centimetre on the lower legs of four healthy volunteers. Connected to a commercially available electrostimulation set-up, the different pairs of electrodes are investigated at different current intensities. It was shown that textile electrodes are an attractive alternative towards commercially available electrodes showing a smooth increase in stimulation with increasing current intensities.