A wearable heart rate belt for ambulant ECG monitoring

Long-term ECG monitoring is desirable in many daily healthcare situations where a wearable device that can continuously record ECG signals is needed. In this work, we proposed a wearable heart rate belt for ambulant ECG monitoring which can be comfortably worn on the chest or the waist. Active textile electrodes were designed for ECG recording. And a battery powered circuit board was developed consisting of ECG signal conditioning circuits, a 3-axis accelerator for body motion detection, a 12-bit AD converter, a DSP for signal processing and a SD card for data storage. The system also includes a wireless communication module that can transmit heart rate data to a sport watch for displaying. Experiments were carried out which shows that the proposed system is unobtrusive and can be comfortably worn by the user during daily activities. When wearing on the waist, ECG signals with reasonably good quality were acquired in rest and walking situations. The proposed system shows promise for long-term ambulant ECG monitoring.