Novel smart clothing with dry electrode biosensor for real-time automatic diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases

Abstract

The incidence of heart disease increases with age. The typical method of monitoring arrhythmia is to use a body patch type sensor with a wet electrode. Even though this sensor is easy to use, it has several disadvantages such as problems caused by wet electrodes in tissues when they are monitored for long periods. Thus, a monitoring sensor integrated into clothes with a dry electrode is proposed. In this study, we developed a smart outdoor shirt equipped with a dry electrode electrocardiogram (ECG) sensor for a cardiac arrhythmia computer-aided diagnosis system. The sensor can be inserted in a console close to the chest, charged, used to communicate wirelessly, and can be connected to a smartphone application. According to experiments, the ECG signals measured by the smart shirt indicated that 97.5 ± 1% of the signals could be measured in an immobile state and at least 85.2 ± 2% of the signals could be measured during movement. In addition, we propose a computer-aided diagnosis system for detecting cardiac arrhythmia. It was determined through experiments that the system can detect arrhythmia with an accuracy of 98.2 ± 2%.