A flexible and miniaturized wireless ECG recording system with metal-skin contacts input for wearable personalized healthcare

This paper presents a miniaturized wireless finger-based ECG acquisition system with metal-skin contact input for wearable healthcare applications. This system is implemented using a novel low-noise analog front-end chip and is equipped with wireless transmission ability allowing the acquired ECG signals to be sent to end-devices such as smartphones or PCs through the Bluetooth V4.0 and Micro USB interface. Benefiting from the compact size of the chipset with many integrated features, which reduces many off-The-shelf components, we are able to achieve a small implementation size of only 1.4 cm by 2.4 cm on the flexible printed circuit board, which improves the wearability of the system. Moreover, we propose a new finger-based placement using dry metal-electrode, which has a much smaller area and is more comfortable than wearing the conventional chest based placement using wet electrode with conduction gel. Experimental results show that the proposed finger-based ECG acquisition system is able to achieve comparable ECG signal quality with the Nihon Kohden ECG-1550P non-portable ECG, which is widely used in hospitals. The good performance and compact size of the proposed system provides an attractive alternative to wearable ECG devices for enhancing the user experience and comfort.