Biopotential sensing technology with electrodes has a great future in medical treatment and human-machine interface, whereas comfort and longevity are two significant problems during usage. Noncontact electrode is a promising alternative to achieve more comfortable and long term biopotential signal recordings than contact electrode. However, it could pick up a significantly higher level of common-mode (CM) noise, which is hardly solved with passive filtering. The impedance imbalance at the electrode-body interface is a limiting factor of this problem, which reduces the common mode rejection ratio (CMRR) of the amplifier. In this work, we firstly present two novel CM noise reduction circuit designs. The circuit designs are based on electrode-body impedance imbalance cancellation. We perform circuit analysis and circuit simulations to explain the principles of the two circuits, both of which showed effectiveness in CM noise rejection. Secondly, we proposed a practical approach to detect and monitor the electrode-body impedance imbalance change. Compared with the conventional approach, it has certain advantages in interference immunity, and good linearity for capacitance. Lastly, we show experimental evaluation results on one of the designs we proposed. The results indicated the validity and feasibility of the approach.
Keywords: biomedical electronics; common-mode noise; electromagnetic interference; noncontact electrode.