The Application Of High Impedance/Capacitively Coupled Electric Potential Sensors To Wearable Devices. A Single Arm ECG. (IDTechEx Sensors USA 2016)

Over the last decade or so, Electric Potential Sensors (EPS) have been successfully developed using capacitively coupled electrodes and ultra-high input impedance amplifiers. The applications of such devices are many-fold but they are especially suited for the rapid and convenient gathering of electro-physiological signals such as electrocardiogram (ECG) and electrocephalogram (EEG). Coupled with the recent advances in conductive textiles this offers the chance of realizing comfortable and easily wearable medical devices. We present here our findings in the application of the Plessey Electric Potential Integrated Circuit (EPIC) EPS sensor in this field and in particular to a single arm ECG system. The single arm ECG has been described as the 'holy grail' for both home/sports monitoring and clinical use. The detection of the sharp 'R' peaks in the signal enables us to calculate a very accurate instantaneous heart rate with which to measure Heart Rate Variance (HRV).

Dr Sean Connor is Applications Engineering Manager for Plessey. He received a B.Eng. degree in Physics with Electronics and Ph.D. in Solid State Physics from The University of Liverpool. He joined Plessey Research Caswell in 1988 as a research scientist and has held a number of positions with the company since then. For the last six years he has held the position of Applications Engineering Manager with special emphasis on Plessey's EPIC sensing technologies.

Plessey is an award-winning provider of full-field emissive microLED displays that combine very high-density RGB pixel arrays with high-performance CMOS backplanes to produce very high-brightness, low-power and high-frame-rate image sources for head-mounted displays (HMDs), and augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) systems. Plessey operates leading-edge 150mm and 200mm wafer processing facilities to undertake design, test and assembly of LED products, and a comprehensive suite of photonic characterization and applications laboratories.