Determining the connection between capacitively coupled electrocardiography data and the ground truth

Capacitively coupled electrocardiography (cECG) is a means of measuring the electrocardiogram (ECG) unobtrusively. Thus, it has a substantial advantage over the standard ECG using galvanic electrodes, which have to be placed directly on the skin of the patient potentially causing skin irritations and inconvenience. Nevertheless, cECG has multiple drawbacks concerning signal quality and is therefore not used in a clinical environment yet. One of the problems regarding cECG is the different morphology of the signal. As a consequence, clinical diagnoses from the cECG are challenging. In this paper, an approach is pursued to estimate the actual ECG from a given cECG. A method based on a multiple-input-single-output deconvolution technique is presented. The aim is to reconstruct a single-lead reference ECG from multiple cECG channels. In order to test this approach, data from previous studies were analyzed. It was found that reconstruction via deconvolution of the reference ECG from three given cECG channels was indeed possible.