UC San Diego

Continuous monitoring of the heart rhythm and electrophysiology is a vital biosensing ability that is routinely utilized by hospitals around the world. This process is made available by detecting electrical activity of the heart during the cardiac cycles using electrodes placed on the surface of the skin; hence producing an electrocardiogram (ECG). Due to the urgency of care, specifically in the emergency rooms, rapid and accurate application of such biosensors are crucial. To address this need, an elastic multi-electrode fabric-based band will be prototyped wherein ECG electrodes and their connecting wires are integrated.Chapter 1 focuses on fabrication and characterization of multi-electrode bands using screen-printing for both dry-electrodes and hydrogel-coated electrodes. Then ECG data is collected for the fabricated electrodes and compared to commercial electrodes in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and waveform. The results indicated that the fabricated multi-electrode band has a slightly lower SNR in comparison to the commercial electrode, but it can be a suitable candidate for ECG recordings. Although screen-printing of electrodes allows for low-cost and rapid manufacturing of such electrodes, the fabrication process can be more automated using printing. In Chapter 2, printing of a passivation layer will be established for an all-printed supercapacitor, and the technology used for printing of this device can be directly transferred to ECG electrode fabrication. Chapter 3, demonstrates a distributed multi-channel frequency-modulation-based data acquisition system for a capacitive pressure sensing transducer; however, this technology is sensor-type-agnostic and can be applied to other biosensors, such as for ECG recordings.