Printed, Skin-Mounted Hybrid System for ECG Measurements

Wearable electronics have started to emerge in the consumer markets over the past few years, and the market forecasts look promising. Especially sports and healthcare industries have shown interest in the field, as wearables present possibilities of measuring one’s vital signals unobtrusively.
In this presentation we report a design and fabrication process for a screen printed, skin-mounted hybrid system for electrocardiogram (ECG) measurements. The system consists of printed electrodes on a stretchable bandage substrate designed to be attached to the chest, an electronics module, and a data receiving device (mobile phone). The reusable electronics unit is attached to the single-use electrode bandage to measure the ECG data. The ECG data is then transmitted to a mobile device via Bluetooth Low Energy and the mobile device then displays the data graphically and sends it further a cloud for storing and further analysis.
The attained quality of the measured ECG signals is fully satisfactory to compute important cardiac parameters and after preprocessing the signal could be used for more profound analysis of ECG wave shapes.