Wearable Noncontact Armband for Mobile ECG Monitoring System

• Published in: IEEE transactions on biomedical circuits and systems 2016-12, Vol.10 (6), p.1112-1118
• Main Authors: Rachim, Vega Pradana, Wan-Young Chung
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Armband; Biomedical monitoring; Bluetooth; bluetooth low energy; capacitive-coupled; Cardiac arrhythmia; Cell Phone; Coronary artery disease; Data transmission; ECG monitoring; EKG; Electrocardiography; Electrocardiography, Ambulatory - instrumentation; Electrocardiography, Ambulatory - methods; Electrodes; Health care; Heart; Heart - diagnostic imaging; Heart diseases; Heart Rate - physiology; Humans; Mobile communication; Monitoring systems; wearable device; Wearable sensors; Wearable technology; Wireless Technology
• ISSN: 1932-4545; 1940-9990
• DOI: 10.1109/TBCAS.2016.2519523

One of the best ways to obtain health information is from an electrocardiogram (ECG). Through an ECG, characteristics such as patients' heartbeats, heart conditions, and heart disease can be analyzed. Unfortunately, most available healthcare devices do not provide clinical data such as information regarding patients' heart activities. Many researchers have tried to solve this problem by inventing wearable heart monitoring systems with a chest strap or wristband, but their performances were not feasible for practical applications. Thus, the aim of this study is to build a new system to monitor heart activity through ECG signals. The proposed system consists of capacitive-coupled electrodes embedded in an armband. It is considered to be a reliable, robust, and low-power-transmission ECG monitoring system. The reliability of this system was achieved by the careful placement of sensors in the armband. Bluetooth low energy (BLE) was used as the protocol for data transmission; this protocol was proposed to develop the low-power-transmission system. For robustness, the proposed system is equipped with analysis capabilities-e.g., real-time heartbeat detection and a filter algorithm to ignore distractions from body movements or noise from the environment.