Fabrication and Analysis of Copper Textrode Characteristics for Monitoring Heart Biopotentials During Physical Activity

Medical wearables are becoming increasingly popular due to advancements in sensor technology and can be used for continuous monitoring of health parameters. However, biosignal monitoring and acquisition systems, such as electrocardiography (ECG) recording of cardiac activity, require the electrodes to contact the human skin. The existing Ag–AgCl electrodes are unsuitable for long-term monitoring as the gel dries out due to dehydration and coagulation. To mitigate this, textile-based dry electrodes using copper (Cu) fabric are developed and analyzed to understand their efficiency in continuous monitoring of cardiac activity. The recorded ECG signal from the developed textrode shows similar performance to Ag–AgCl electrodes. The efficacy of Cu textrode across different layers is analyzed using surface resistance, thickness, and surface area. The result indicates that the surface resistance of Cu textrode is relatively equivalent across multilayers. The correlation coefficient of different layers of Cu textrode has a mean and standard deviation of 0.85 ± 0.18 to 0.97 ± 0.03. The Cu textrodes show more prominent and reliable ECG data across different layers. In addition, ECG intervals such as RR, ST, PQ, and QRS intervals between the Cu textrode and Ag–AgCl electrodes also show a high correlation. Thus, Cu fabric textrodes can be utilized as an alternative to Ag–AgCl electrodes for ECG data acquisition and continuous cardiac monitoring during different activities.