A configurable biopotentials acquisition module suitable for fetal electrocardiography studies

Abstract

The issue of biopotentials acquisition with surface electrodes has been studied for several years, during which a number of reliable techniques have been developed. Nowadays, they form a solid background of practices exploited in every commercially available biopotential acquisition module. Nevertheless, in some application fields where signal processing of the acquired signals is controversial, due to the lack of a deep understanding of the underlying physical aspects, there is the need to test several recording setups to define the one producing the best results. In fact, signal acquisition has strong influence on the signal processing techniques that can be deployed to post-process the data. Non-invasive fetal electrocardiography (ECG) is one of those field. In order to enable the investigation of the aspects connected with the signal acquisition, we developed a custom biopotential acquisition unit, with configurable measurement setup. It is intrinsically general purpose, but has been conceived to support studies on non-invasive fetal ECG on the animal model. Based on the ADS1298 analog front-end, the developed system achieves comparable performance with respect to commercial systems for physiological research opening to the first animals studies about the influence of the acquisition setup on the effectiveness of the signal processing algorithms for fetal ECG extraction.