Wearable armband with a floating mobile exploratory electrode at fingertip for on-demand touch-and-measure multilead electrocardiography.

Abstract

Spurred by the global pandemic, research in health monitoring has pivoted towards the development of smart garments, enabling long-term tracking of individuals' cardiovascular health by continuously monitoring the electrocardiogram (ECG) and detecting any abnormality in the signal morphology. Many types of dry electrodes have been proposed as alternatives to gold standard Ag/AgCl wet electrodes, and they have been integrated into clothes capable of acquiring only a limited number of the different ECG traces. This limitation severely diminishes the diagnostic utility of the collected ECG data and obstructs the garment's potential for clinical-level evaluation. Here, we demonstrate a special ECG upper armband with a glove component which houses graphene-textile electrodes, where a fully mobile, exploring electrode located at the index finger enables the user to strategically position the electrode on-demand to desired body areas and measure the different ECG traces that are bipolar limb and unipolar chest leads. Based on measurements with and without employing the well-known Wilson Central Terminal (WCT) arrangement, the correlation ratio of unipolar ECG chest leads acquired with the graphene textile-based armband and Ag/AgCl electrodes both in "WCT-less" configuration reach up to %99.65; and up to %99.54 when Ag/AgCl electrodes are utilized "with WCT" while the graphene-based armband in "WCT-less" configuration. To the authors' best knowledge, this study reports the first multilead on-demand "touch-and-measure" ECG recording from a fully wearable textile garment. Moreover, owing to the human-centered armband design, we achieved a more than three-fold reduction in electrode count from 10 in clinical ECG practice down to 3.