Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2017 Apr 16;17(4):875.
doi: 10.3390/s17040875.

Intelligent Medical Garments with Graphene-Functionalized Smart-Cloth ECG Sensors

Murat Kaya Yapici  1   2   3 , Tamador Elboshra Alkhidir  4
Affiliations

Intelligent Medical Garments with Graphene-Functionalized Smart-Cloth ECG Sensors

Murat Kaya Yapici et al. Sensors (Basel). .

Abstract

Biopotential signals are recorded mostly by using sticky, pre-gelled electrodes, which are not ideal for wearable, point-of-care monitoring where the usability of the personalized medical device depends critically on the level of comfort and wearability of the electrodes. We report a fully-wearable medical garment for mobile monitoring of cardiac biopotentials from the wrists or the neck with minimum restriction to regular clothing habits. The wearable prototype is based on elastic bands with graphene functionalized, textile electrodes and battery-powered, low-cost electronics for signal acquisition and wireless transmission. Comparison of the electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings obtained from the wearable prototype against conventional wet electrodes indicate excellent conformity and spectral coherence among the two signals.

Keywords: ECG electrode; arrhytmia; conductive textile; electrocardiogram; graphene; mHealth; medical garment; smart fabric; wearable sensor; wristband.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
System level integration and placement of textile-based electrodes to form wearable, intelligent, medical garments for ECG sensing from the wrist or the neck: (a) wristband; (b) neckband.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Steps showing the integration of graphene-clad textiles into elastic bands: (a) textile pieces glued on a cotton sheet; (b) sewing the textiles to form wristband; and (c) neckband; (d) insulation of snap fasteners (e) prototype of a complete graphene-clad textile integrated wristband.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Raw electrocardiograms recorded using a commercial data acquisition unit. (a) ECG signal obtained from the wearable wristband; and (b) ECG signal obtained from the wearable neckband.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Filtered ECG recordings obtained from (a) wristband; and (b) neckband.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Block diagram of the graphene-clad textile based wearable ECG monitoring system and schematic of the ECG front-end acquisition circuit.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Live demonstration of ECG measurement using the prototype graphene-clad textile embedded wearable wristband with integrated electronics.
Figure 7
Figure 7
ECG signal acquired from the wrists using the prototype graphene-clad textile embedded wearable garment: (a) raw ECG recording; and (b) filtered ECG signal.
Figure 8
Figure 8
ECG signal acquired from the wrists using conventional Ag/AgCl electrodes with the same: (a) raw ECG recording; and (b) filtered ECG signal.
Figure 9
Figure 9
(a) ECG segmentation and alignment of P-QRS-T intervals recorded from conventional Ag/AgCl electrodes and the graphene-clad textile embedded wearable prototype; (b) example of an aligned P-QRS-T interval.
Figure 10
Figure 10
Power spectral density of the ECG signals obtained from the graphene-clad textile embedded wearable prototype and conventional Ag/AgCl electrodes: (a) before filtering; and (b) after filtering.
Figure 11
Figure 11
Electrocardiogram recording showing motion-related artifacts as a result of twisting of the wrist and artifact removal by adaptive filtering.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Jain P.K., Tiwari A.K. Heart monitoring systems—A review. Comput. Biol. Med. 2014;54:1–13. doi: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2014.08.014. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Fung E., Järvelin M.-R., Doshi R.N., Shinbane J.S., Carlson S.K., Grazette L.P., Chang P.M., Sangha R.S., Huikuri H.V., Peters N.S. Electrocardiographic patch devices and contemporary wireless cardiac monitoring. Front. Physiol. 2015;6:1–10. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2015.00149. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Marozas V., Petrenas A., Daukantas S., Lukosevicius A. A comparison of conductive textile-based and silver/silver chloride gel electrodes in exercise electrocardiogram recordings. J. Electrocardiol. 2011;44:189–194. doi: 10.1016/j.jelectrocard.2010.12.004. - DOI - PubMed
    1. McAdams E. Biomedical electrodes for biopotential monitoring and electrostimulation. In: Yoo H.-J., van Hoof C., editors. Bio-Medical CMOS ICs. 1st ed. Springer; New York, NY, USA: 2011. pp. 31–124.
    1. Xu P.J., Zhang H., Tao X.M. Textile-structured electrodes for electrocardiogram. Text. Prog. 2008;40:183–213. doi: 10.1080/00405160802597479. - DOI

LinkOut - more resources