A Novel Sensor-Array System for Contactless Electrocardiogram Acquisition

The cardiac ECG is one of the most important human biometrics. An electrocardiogram (ECG) or EKG, captures the electrical activity of the heart and allows a healthcare professional to evaluate, diagnose, and monitor patient cardiac condition. The standard method to capture electrocardiogram signals (ECG) involves skin preparation and attachment of wet electrodes to the skin, which is not comfortable for the patient and requires a trained technician. In this work, a novel contactless-based ECG system is proposed, where 128 sensors are deployed on a mattress to capture the ECG information from the back of the patient. The proposed system can capture the ECG through clothing and is more comfortable to the patients. The measurements captured by the proposed system provides a 100% accuracy of QRS complex detection and heartbeat rate estimation and a maximum of 4% error in other major ECG features compared to a hospital-grade standard system. This paper shows that ECG features can be accurately extracted from contactless electrodes, through clothing and from the back of the patient.