Non-contact wearable synchronous measurement method of electrocardiogram and seismocardiogram signals.

Cardiovascular disease is one of the leading threats to human lives and its fatality rate still rises gradually year by year. Driven by the development of advanced information technologies, such as big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, remote/distributed cardiac healthcare is presenting a promising future. The traditional dynamic cardiac health monitoring method based on electrocardiogram (ECG) signals only has obvious deficiencies in comfortableness, informativeness, and accuracy under motion state. Therefore, a non-contact, compact, wearable, synchronous ECG and seismocardiogram (SCG) measuring system, based on a pair of capacitance coupling electrodes with ultra-high input impedance, and a high-resolution accelerometer were developed in this work, which can collect the ECG and SCG signals at the same point simultaneously through the multi-layer cloth. Meanwhile, the driven right leg electrode for ECG measurement is replaced by the AgCl fabric sewn to the outside of the cloth for realizing the total gel-free ECG measurement. Besides, synchronous ECG and SCG signals at multiple points on the chest surface were measured, and the recommended measuring points were given by their amplitude characteristics and the timing sequence correspondence analysis. Finally, the empirical mode decomposition algorithm was used to adaptively filter the motion artifacts within the ECG and SCG signals for measuring performance enhancement under motion states. The results demonstrate that the proposed non-contact, wearable cardiac health monitoring system can effectively collect ECG and SCG synchronously under various measuring situations.