MEDICAL ELECTRODE QUALIFICATION: PRELIMINARY DESIGN, INTEGRATION, AND VALIDATION OF THE TESTING SETUP

Abstract

Over the past decades, researchers have been increasingly interested in developing and fabricating various new types of medical electrodes for the purpose of monitoring biopotentials or health signs. Among these electrodes, textile-embedded electrodes are the ones with the potential for long-term monitoring of health signs through the skin. In essence, textile-embedded electrodes are considered to be dry electrodes. They have conductivity hundreds to thousands of times lower compared to the available wet electrodes on the market. As a result, fabricating a highly conductive textile-embedded electrode, with essential characteristics such as durability, washability, and biocompatibility, would be beneficial. To that end, a systematic electrical conductivity testing setup for medical electrode qualification is a critical step in the design of experiments for fabricating new electrodes. The scope of the current research is to design, fabricate, integrate, verify, and validate a preliminary testing setup based on the ANSI/AAMI EC12/2000/R2020 standard (the ANSI/AAMI standard) for medical electrode qualification in research laboratories. We verify and validate our unique testing setup as a robust starting point that simulates the interface between skin and market available electrodes with the hope that it might potentially be used to measures the electrical impedance of various novel fabricated medical electrodes in research laboratories in the future. The focus of our investigations in this thesis is specifically on electrocardiography (ECG) measurement as the targeted biopotential. ECG was selected as it shows the overall condition and performance of a vital organ, the heart, in the body. Impedance was studied as a starting point for the electrical performance analysis of the medical electrodes in order to verify and validate the setup. The stability of the data produced by the setup was also investigated using an invariable stainless steel electrode. The results of the electrical performance of electrodes were compared together and statistical analysis were performed and interpreted. Overall, the current work shows that the integrated preliminary testing setup is a good starting point to further invest resources to develop more integrated features.