Electrospun polyurethane microfiber membrane on conductive textile for water-supported textile electrode in continuous ECG monitoring application

Recently, the embroidered water reservoir on the conductive textile electrodes has been introduced for physiological signal detection. Such electrode system requires water vapor to be continuously evaporated from a water reservoir through a semi-permeable membrane to conductive textile, thereby lowering contact impedance at the skin-electrode interface. To further simplify the fabrication process of this system, our group proposes to directly fabricate water-supported layer from electrospun polyurethane (PU) microfiber on conductive textile electrodes. Both aligned PU microfiber membrane and randomly oriented PU microfiber membrane are well deposited on silver-coated conductive textile without impeding water vapor transport. With our water-support layer, wet textile electrodes have comparable contact impedance as silver/silver chloride (Ag/AgCl) electrodes and successfully record electrocardiogram (ECG) signals with high signal-to-noise ratio Thus, our electrospun PU microfiber membrane for the water-supported system on the textile electrode is promising for ECG monitoring application.