Wearable ECG Module for Long-term Recordings using a Smartphone Processor

Life-threatening cardiovascular diseases require early detection or diagnosis. A standard procedure, long-term ECG monitoring of cardiac patients is currently the best way to reduce the number of heart failures. Dry and washable textile electrodes embedded in comfortable garment or in a wearable chest belt have been proven very effective for a long-term ECG monitoring in comparison to the conventional Ag/AgCl electrodes. Hereby, we present a wearable ECG chest belt, which contains stitched textile electrodes for ECG detection and analog preprocessing circuits embedded in tiny cell-phone plugs. With them we achieve onsite ECG processing, display and transmission using a dualcore OMAP3-based embedded system. Our experiments have shown promising results of textile electrodes along with our hardware and embedded system in conveying a better ECG signal quality having a clinical significance and hence enabled long-term ECG recording in a daily life. Author