A Smart Textile Electrode Belt for ECG Recordings - A Pilot Study with Indian Population

As the smart textile technology is growing in the field of remote healthcare, there is a lot of research ongoing towards developing smart textile electrodes for biopotential monitoring. This study proves that under the stationary condition of the subject, the proposed design of silver-plated nylon woven (SiPNyW) textile electrode has the capability of recording ECG signal which is comparable with that obtainable by a traditional Ag/AgCl gel electrodes with better signal quality. A SiPNyW based textile electrode belt with Lead-I configuration was used to record ECGs and signal quality was assessed in terms of visual identification of peaks, Skin-Electrode contact impedance, Power Spectral Density (PSD), Signal to Noise ratio (SNR), peak-peak amplitude, Root Mean Square (RMS) value, RR variation and HR Variation. In this study, healthy Indian volunteers with n=147 of age 18–45 years have participated for HRV analysis. The results have shown that the quality of ECG signal acquired by textile electrodes was quite comparable with that of Ag/AgCl disposable electrodes. The standard deviation of heart rate (HR) and R-R interval (RR) was less in 31–45 age group compared to that of 18–30 age group. For the age group 18–30, max percentage error in HR and R-R interval was found to be less than 18% and 17% respectively. For the age group 31–45, the max percentage error in HR and the R-R interval was found to be below 8%. It can be concluded that the proposed textile electrodes belt can be used for the recording of ECG signals under resource constrained settings.