Clinical Validation of Practicability of Capacitive ECG Measurement for Ubiquitous Healthcare

The objective of the trail is to measure and wirelessly transmit capacitive based electrocardiogram of a patient and validate its practicability in comparison with conventional system in clinical setup. Also to evaluate usability of the system with questionnaire responses. Capacitive plates are used as electrodes to acquire ECG signal from the subjects. Conductive electrodes are capacitively coupled with the skin through an insulator. Copper were chosen as electrode leads due to its good conductivity (6.30×107 S/m) . To make the electrodes 5cm X 8cm with thickness of 0.3mm copper plate were used. Preamplifier board was allocated and soldered with its input lead on one of the plate faces. Output of the pre-amplifier is passed through an instrumentation amplifier of gain 420 followed by high pass and low pass filter of frequency 0.4 to 40 Hz respectively. NodeMCU is used as an IoT platform to receive cECG analog input from acquisition board and transfers the data wirelessly to the web server. Server runs two codes. Once to receive the data transmitted by NodeMCU and the second to write cECG data to a database. Server and the NodeMCU will be connected to the same network through a wifi router. Database is created on the local computer and continuously saves the cECG data as and when received by the server.

The methodology of the trial is as follows:

1.       The experiment protocol and the variables measured will be explained and data collection process will begin only after the participant expresses his/her consent

2.       Measure patient health status by temperature, blood pressure and notes from doctor.

3.       Measure ECG signal from patient through hospital conventional method and our proposed capacitive ECG device

4.       Validate signal quality and device specifications with conventional system

5.       Validate practicality and usability with questionnaire responses from patients, nurses and doctors.