Skin-electrode contact area in electrical bioimpedance spectroscopy. Influence in total body composition assessment

Electrical Bioimpedance Spectroscopy (EBIS) has been widely used for assessment of total body composition and fluid distribution. (EBIS) measurements are commonly performed with electrolytic electrodes placed on the wrist and the ankle with a rather small skin-electrode contact area. The use of textile garments for EBI requires the integration of textrodes with a larger contact area surrounding the limbs in order to compensate the absence of electrolytic medium commonly present in traditional Ag/AgCl gel electrodes. Recently it has been shown that mismatch between the measurements electrodes might cause alterations on the EBIS measurements. When performing EBIS measurements with textrodes certain differences have been observed, especially at high frequencies, respect the same EBIS measurements using Ag/AgCl electrodes. In this work the influence of increasing the skin-electrode area on the estimation of body composition parameters has been studied performing experimental EBIS measurement. The results indicate that an increment on the area of the skin-electrode interface produced noticeable changes in the bioimpedance spectra as well as in the body composition parameters. Moreover, the area increment showed also an apparent reduction of electrode impedance mismatch effects. This influence must be taken into consideration when designing and testing textile-enable EBIS measurement systems.