Wearable ECG system for health and sports monitoring

A wireless ECG system using dry-contact electrodes is presented. The system consists of a pair of coin sized dry-contact electrodes manufactured on a standard printed circuit board that can operate both on top of the skin and through clothing and can be embedded within comfortable layers of fabric. The wireless main unit assures the transmission of the ECG signal to a computer for storage and processing. The system provides a differential gain of 56dB over a 1–150Hz bandwidth. Signals are digitized with a 10-bit ADC and samples are transferred via ultra-low power ANT+ wireless technology. The preliminary results showed that the proposed wearable system is ideally suited for monitoring patient cardiac activity in real time at home, healthcare or sports facilities. It is highly suitable for integration in wearable ECG chest harness.