Development of Seat-mounted Non-Intrusive ECG Sensing System

Objective: The aim of this study is to measure driver’s ECG signal non-intrusively using a seat-mounted conductive sensor system. Background: Driving workload has been identified as one of the leading causes of traffic accidents and this fact made many research groups to study the driver’s workload state monitoring during driving. The workload can be estimated by measuring driver’s heart rate. Method: The proposed non-intrusive ECG sensor system consists of conductive sensors and amplifier, Bluetooth transmitter, and post signal processing system. The sensors which mounted on a driver seat back, detect the local electric potential, and the sensing data is transmitted to post signal processing system via Bluetooth modules. The transmitted data was sampled and stored digitally on the laptop. The data was filtered through anti-aliasing band-pass filters. For evaluating the accuracy from this system, comparisons between proposed system and commercially available surface electrode based ECG measurement system were conducted. R-R interval and ECG correlation were used for evaluating accuracy. Conclusion: This system can be used for measuring ECG signal non-intrusively during driving. Application: The use of this system can help to develop systems for monitoring driver’s workload in real-time.