Source-level motion artifact suppression in wearable electrodes: From underlying mechanisms to advanced strategies

Motion artifacts (MAs) significantly degrade the quality of surface biopotential signals acquired in dynamic environments (such as during body movements), severely compromising their reliable application in health monitoring and disease diagnosis. Although various post-processing methods have been reported to mitigate MAs, they often entail inherent limitations (such as signal distortion, latency, and incomplete artifact removal), highlighting the necessity of suppressing MAs at their source. This review provides an in-depth analysis of the mechanisms underlying MA generation and systematically summarizes source-level MAs suppression strategies based on innovations in electrode materials and structures. These strategies mainly include skin-anchoring strategy, deformation constraint strategy, strain-insensitive strategy and damping strategy. By stabilizing the skin-electrode interface and mitigating mechanical interference, they significantly reduce the occurrence of artifacts. The advantages and challenges of these strategies are further evaluating and future prospects toward achieving motion-artifact-free biopotential dynamic recording are also discussed. This review offers a clear framework and direction for the design of high-performance electrophysiological electrodes tailored for dynamic applications.