A Non-Contact Electrode for Measurement of Electrocardiography

Heart disease has become a widespread epidemic threatening the health of millions of Americans and costing billions of dollars in therapy. In heart disease treatment, an effective heart monitoring technique is desired. In this thesis, a novel non-contact electrode was designed and fabricated to measure electrocardiography (ECG) based on widely used spherical volume conductor model. This model has been demonstrated to have a closed-form solution, which enables measurement of electric potential with capacitive electrode. Finite element analysis performed in Ansoft Maxwell software showed the feasibility of using an X-antenna to represent the ideal current dipole. The capacitive electrode we designed consists of two small sensing electrodes and a large reference electrode. This electrode measured promising signals for both direct and non-contact tests on spherical volume conductor model. Experiments were performed to find the best orientation and location for the electrode to measure the most significant signals on the surface of the sphere. Our electrode can also showed positive results in realizing both direct and non-contact measurement of the real ECG signals.

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