On the Feasibility of Using Textile Electrodes for Electrical Bioimpedance Measurements

Sammanfattning: The application of textile electrodes has been widely studied for biopotential recordings,especially for monitoring cardiac activity. Commercially available applications, such as theAdistar T-shirt and the Numetrex Cardioshirt, have shown good performance for heart ratemonitoring and are available worldwide.Textile technology can also be used for electrical bioimpedance (EBI) spectroscopymeasurements in home and personalized health monitoring applications, however solid basicresearch about the measurement performance of the electrodes must be performed prior to thedevelopment of any textile-enabled EBI application.This research work studies the performance of EBI spectroscopy measurements whenperformed with textile electrodes. An analysis using an electrical circuit equivalent model andexperimental data obtained with the Impedimed spectrometer SFB7 was carried out. Theexperimental study focused on EBI spectroscopy measurements obtained with different types oftextile electrodes and in different measurement scenarios. The equivalent model analysis focusedon the influence of the electrode polarization impedance Zep on the EBI spectroscopymeasurements in the frequency range of 3 kHz to 500 kHz.The analysis of the obtained complex EBI spectra shows that the measurements obtainedwith textile electrodes produce constant and reliable EBI spectra. The results also indicate theimportance of the skin-electrode interface in EBI spectroscopy measurement.Textile technology, if successfully integrated, may enable the performance of EBIspectroscopy measurements in new scenarios, which would allow the generation of novel,wearable, or textile-enabled applications for home and personal health monitoring