Adhesive Carbon Paste Electrode for Convenient and Long-term Electrocardiogram Monitoring: A Pilot Study

Long-term electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring is an important and widely-used technique in the clinic that helps with the diagnosis of possible diseases that cannot be detected in a short time monitoring. However, the clinically used electrode needs conductive gel to reduce the impedance between the skin and the electrodes, which easily causes the possibility of allergy. Moreover, as the conductive gel becomes dry, the signal's quality will decrease accordingly. In this paper, we proposed a novel adhesive Carbon Paste Electrode (CPE) to achieve convenient and long-term ECG monitoring. By comparing the time-domain waveforms, the R-R peak intervals difference, and the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of ECG with the traditional conductive gel-based electrode (Gel) in fixed and unfixed conditions, the performance of the proposed CPE was investigated. The results showed that the CPE could achieve similar ECG monitoring both in fixed and unfixed conditions. When on Day 2, the quality acquired by Gel began to decrease while CPE was still stable, which was obvious especially in unfixed condition. The R-R peak intervals showed that on Day 2, the Gel was unreliable with some abnormal points occurring. Besides, the results of SNR and average heart rate (AHR) also confirmed that the CPE could achieve similar results as Gel on Day 1 and outperformed Gel on Day 2. It is believed that the proposed CPE opens a window of high-quality long-term ECG monitoring with more convenience.