Adaptive noise cancellation method for capacitively coupled ECG sensor using single insulated electrode

This paper describes a noise reduction method for capacitively coupled ECG sensors. Capacitively coupled sensors using an insulated electrode have been proposed to obtain ECG signals without pasting electrodes directly onto the skin. It can achieve better usability than conventional ECG sensors. However, it is difficult to remove noise contamination, because the high input impedance and low input capacitance are required to realize the capacitively coupled ECG sensor. Especially, base-line drift and power-line noise are more serious problem when using a single electrode structure. To address this problem, we propose a noise cancellation technique using an adaptive noise feedback approach, which can improve the availability of the capacitive ECG sensor using a single electrode. An instrumental amplifier is used in the proposed method for the first stage amplifier instead of voltage follower circuits. A microcontroller predicts the noise waveform from an ADC output. To avoid saturation caused by base-line drift and power-line noise, the predicted noise waveform is fed back to an amplifier input through a DAC. We implemented the prototype sensor system to evaluate the noise reduction performance. Measurement results show that the proposed method can suppress both of base-line drift and power-line noise simultaneously.