Motion artefact removals for wearable ECG using stationary wavelet transform

Wearable Electrocardiogram (ECG) is attracting much attention in daily healthcare applications. From the viewpoint of long-term use, it is desired that the electrodes are non-contact with the human body. In this study, the authors propose an algorithm using the stationary wavelet transform (SWT) to remove motion artefact superimposed on ECG signal when using non-contact capacitively coupling electrodes. The authors evaluate the effect on motion artefact removal of this algorithm by applying it to various ECG signals with motion artefacts superimposed. As a result, the correlation coefficients of ECG signals with respect to the clean ones have been improved from 0.71 to 0.88 on median before and after motion artefact removal, which demonstrates the validity of the proposed SWT-based algorithm.