Electronics of a Wearable ECG With Level Crossing Sampling and Human Body Communication

In this paper, the human body communication (HBC) and level crossing sampling (LCS) are combined to design electronics for a wearable electrocardiograph (ECG). The ECG signals acquired by capacitively coupled electrodes are sampled with LCS in place of conventional synchronous sampling. In order to transmit signals through HBC at low frequencies (100 kHz, 1 MHz), an electric field sensor with high input impedance is adopted as the front end of the HBC receiver. The HBC channel gain is enhanced by more than 30 dB with the electric field sensor. An LCS structure based on the send-on-delta concept is implemented with discrete components to convert the ECG signals into binary impulses. The converted impulses are modulated by an on-off keying modulator and then transmitted via the human body to the receiver. A prototype ECG waist belt is developed with commercially available components and experimentally evaluated. The results indicate that the acquired ECG waveforms exhibit good agreement with regular Ag/AgCl ECG methods. The heartbeat detection using a technique based on the Kadane's algorithm and the power consumption performance of the proposed system are also discussed.