Printed and Flexible ECG Electrodes Attached to the Steering Wheel for Continuous Health Monitoring during Driving

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 22; no. 11; p. 4198
• Main Authors: Warnecke, Joana M, Ganapathy, Nagarajan, Koch, Eugen, Dietzel, Andreas, Flormann, Maximilian, Henze, Roman, Deserno, Thomas M
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 31.05.2022; MDPI
• Subjects: Adhesives; Algorithms; Cardiac arrhythmia; digital prevention; Driver behavior; Electrocardiogram; Electrocardiography; Electrodes; Equipment and supplies; health monitoring; Neural networks; Noise; Polyurethane resins; printed electrodes; Roads & highways; Rural areas; Sensors; Signal processing; Signal to noise ratio; Signs and symptoms; Silver; smart car; Telemedicine; Testing; Wavelet transforms; Germany; Lisbon Portugal; United States > US; Portugal; smart car; printed electrodes; digital prevention; health monitoring
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s22114198

Continuous health monitoring in a vehicle enables the earlier detection of symptoms of cardiovascular diseases. In this work, we designed flexible and thin electrodes made of polyurethane for long-term electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring while driving. We determined the time for reliable ECG recording to evaluate the effectiveness of the electrodes. We recorded data from 19 subjects under four scenarios: rest, city, highway, and rural. The recording time was five min for rest and 15 min for the other scenarios. The total recording (950 min) is publicly available under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license. We used the simultaneous truth and performance level estimation (STAPLE) algorithm to detect the position of R-waves. Then, we derived the RR intervals to compare the estimated heart rate with the ground truth, which we obtained from ECG electrodes on the chest. We calculated the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and averaged it for the different scenarios. Highway had the lowest SNR (-6.69 dB) and rural had the highest (-6.80 dB). The usable time of the steering wheel was 42.46% (city), 46.67% (highway), and 47.72% (rural). This indicates that steering-wheel-based ECG recording is feasible and delivers reliable recordings from about 45.62% of the driving time. In summary, the developed electrodes allow continuous in-vehicle heart rate monitoring, and our publicly available recordings provide the opportunity to apply more sophisticated data analytics.