Flexible dry surface-electrodes for ECG long-term monitoring

In this paper a new generation of dry electrodes for ECG-recording purposes is presented. These electrodes are flexible, biocompatible, biostable and perform a dry signal acquisition without the use of any electrolyte gel or adhesive. Thereby no skin preparation is needed. The material properties allow integration into textiles to form intelligent clothes for long-term monitoring duties. The electrodes can be washed together with the carrier textiles and provide a very good wearing comfort resulting in wide acceptance by the patients. The Department Medical Engineering and Neuroprosthetics of the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering developed these electrodes mainly to process the Electrocardiogram, however, in first tests they proved their capability even for other biosignal requirements like surface-EMG. In either case the signal quality of the dry electrodes is comparable to commercial Ag/AgCl gel-electrodes.