Night-time EKG and HRV monitoring with bed sheet integrated textile electrodes

A system for unobtrusive night-time electrocardiogram (EKG) and heart rate variability (HRV) monitoring as well as data analysis methods are presented, comparing bed sheet HR and HRV values with corresponding parameters obtained by a reference measurement. Our system uses eight embroidered textile electrodes attached laterally to a bed sheet for measuring bipolar contact EKG from multiple channels. The electrodes are arranged in a line so that at least two adjacent electrodes make sufficient skin contact. The focus of the signal processing development has been on selecting the best measurement channel for further analysis and minimizing the amount of incorrectly detected R-peaks. The test measurements were performed with four healthy men without previously known cardiac disorders and one who frequently had premature ventricular contractions (ectopic beats). For healthy test subjects, an average of 94.9% heartbeat detection coverage was achieved with the system during 29 measurement nights (in total 213.8 h of data). In most cases, the quality of the signal obtained from bed sheet electrodes is good enough for the computer-assisted cardiac arrhythmia detection. Applications for EKG derived RR-interval data include the calculation of HRV parameters that can be utilized in sleep quality analysis and other wellness-related topics as well as sleep apnoea detection.