A Driving Right Leg Circuit (DgRL) for Improved Common Mode Rejection in Bio-Potential Acquisition Systems

The paper presents a novel Driving Right Leg (DgRL) circuit designed to mitigate the effect of common mode signals deriving, say, from power line interferences. The DgRL drives the isolated ground of the instrumentation towards a voltage which is fixed with respect to the common mode potential on the subject, therefore minimizing common mode voltage at the input of the front-end. The paper provides an analytical derivation of the common mode rejection performances of DgRL as compared to the usual grounding circuit or Driven Right Leg (DRL) loop. DgRL is integrated in a bio-potential acquisition system to show how it can reduce the common mode signal of more than 70 dB with respect to standard patient grounding. This value is at least 30 dB higher than the reduction achievable with DRL, making DgRL suitable for single-ended front-ends, like those based on active electrodes. EEG signal acquisition is performed to show how the system can successfully cancel power line interference without any need for differential acquisition, signal post-processing or filtering.