Increasing signal to noise ratio and minimizing artefacts in biomedical instrumentation systems

Capturing a near-perfect, artefact free signal is an ideal of biomedicine. However, this depends on the removal of different types of artefact, all of which can be considered unwanted noise on the desired signal. Failure to remove artefacts could lead to a clinical misinterpretation of the results. All medical equipment such as electrocardiogram systems which use electrodes attached to patients suffer from artefacts, with effects ranging from minor blurring to significant distortion of the output signal(s). For this reason, it is important to identify how artefacts can influence the output signal. In this paper, we propose a new technique to detect and minimise movement artefacts using strain gauges embedded into the electrodes.