Validation of a Novel Tattoo Electrode for ECG Monitoring

In this work, novel ultrathin and unperceivable Parylene C electrodes (conventionally indicated as ‘tattoo electrodes’) for ECG detection were comparatively assessed against off-the-shelf gelled Ag/AgCl ones. To this aim, six 60s-long single-lead ECG signals were recorded from three volunteers. Signals from Ag/AgCl and tattoo electrodes were simultaneously acquired at 2048 Hz using the TMSi Porti7 system. Although tattoo electrodes suffered from slightly higher baseline wandering artifacts (1±1 mV) than Ag/AgCl ones (0.08±0.04 mV), they both achieved high and similar signal-to-noise ratio (33±2 dB and 34±2 dB for Ag/AgCl and tattoo electrodes, respectively) and allowed for the extraction of comparable R-R intervals. Furthermore, heartbeat morphologies extracted by the different electrodes showed high correlation (0.999±0.001). Therefore, our findings suggest the possibility of successfully using these novel tattoo electrodes for unobtrusive ECG monitoring, ensuring high consistency with respect to gelled Ag/AgCl electrodes.