Wireless three-pad ECG system: Challenges, design, and evaluations

Electrocardiography (ECG) is a widely accepted approach for monitoring of cardiac activity and clinical diagnosis of heart diseases. Since cardiologists have been well-trained to accept 12-lead ECG information, a huge number of ECG systems are using such number of electrodes and placement configuration to facilitate fast interpretation. Our goal is to design a wireless ECG system which renders conventional 12-lead ECG information. We pro pose the three-pad ECG system (W3ECG). W3ECG furthers the pad design idea of the single-pad approach. Signals obtained from these three pads, plus their placement information, make it possible to synthesize conventional 12-lead ECG signals. We provide one example of pad placement and evaluate its performance by examining ECG data of four patients available from online database. Feasibility test of our selected pad placement positions show comparable results with respect to the EASI lead system. Experimental results also exhibit high correlations between synthesized and directly observed 12-lead signals (9 out of 12 cross-correlation coefficients higher than 0.75).