Real time non-contact remote cardiac monitoring

The demands and interests in non-contact health monitoring have increased rapidly in recent years due to its noninvasive method and easy to use in daily life. In this paper, a real time and non-contact based cardiac monitoring system including a sensor is presented. The sensor is capacitively-coupled with human skin and does not cause impediments in the natural movement of the user. Moreover, low power RF module nRF24L01+ and passive components were used for reducing power consumption. Current monitoring systems for premature infants are not convenient due to the usage of patched or adhesive tape for monitoring vital information. The front end circuit is integrated with multiple stages of amplifier, filters, analog to digital converter and the wireless module. The non-contact capacitive electrode was integrated into the leather belt as well as in the chair to monitor electrocardiography (ECG) signals. In this work, a simple and easily accessible ECG monitoring sensor node for body area networks was designed and tested. The proposed system was compared through experiments with the one with Ag/Agcl based electrodes. The results show that the proposed system could accurately be used as a medical grade equipment for long-term health monitoring.