A prototype of an electrocardiogram (ECG) signal acquisition system with multiple unipolar capacitively coupled electrodes is designed and experimentally tested. Capacitively coupled electrodes made of a standard printed circuit board (PCB) are used as the sensing electrodes. Different from the conventional measurement schematics, where one single lead ECG signal is acquired from a pair of sensing electrodes, the sensing electrodes in our approaches operate in a unipolar mode, i.e., the biopotential signals picked up by each sensing electrodes are amplified and sampled separately. Four unipolar electrodes are mounted on the backrest of a regular chair and therefore four channel of signals containing ECG information are sampled and processed. It is found that the qualities of ECG signal contained in the four channel are different from each other. In order to pick up the ECG signal, an index for quality evaluation, as well as for aggregation of multiple signals, is proposed based on phase space reconstruction. Experimental tests are carried out while subjects sitting on the chair and clothed. The results indicate that the ECG signals can be reliably obtained in such a unipolar way.
Keywords: capacitively coupled ECG; phase space reconstruction; smart chair; unipolar electrode.