Five Day Attachment ECG Electrodes for Longitudinal Bio-Sensing Using Conformal Tattoo Substrates

State-of-the-art ECG (electrocardiography) uses wet Silver/Silver-Chloride (Ag/AgCl) electrodes, where a conductive gel is used to provide a resistive, low impedance, connection to the skin. These electrodes are very easy to apply, but have a significant number of limitations for personalized and preventative healthcare. In particular, that the gel dries out giving a limited connection time. This paper presents ECG electrodes manufactured using the inkjet printing of Silver nanoparticles onto a conformal tattoo substrate. The substrate maintains a high quality connection to the body for many days at a time allowing ECG monitoring over periods not previously possible without electrode re-attachment. The design and manufacture of the conformal electrodes is presented, together with detailed characterization of the electrode performance in terms of the signal to noise ratio and baseline wander. The signal to noise ratio is shown to still be over 30 dB five days after the initial electrode attachment.