A wearable 1-lead necklace ECG for continuous heart rate monitoring

Aulia Arif Iskandar, Reiner Kolla, Klaus Schilling, Wolfram Völker

Abstract: Nowadays, people are getting more and more concern on their own fitness conditions and it has become a digital healthy lifestyle movement. A basic activity tracker has given many data on the user's movement to fulfill their daily goal of calories burned. An advance tracker can also measure heart rate with accurate activity intense level. However, consider if these fitness devices can be used for clinical diagnosis by adding an ECG, then it can be a daily health monitoring or a health assisted device by connecting it to the internet via a smartphone. To use an ECG as a wearable device, the electrode positions has to fulfill the clinical placement. A new biomedical electrodes placement is proposed in this paper to meet the practicality of a fitness lifestyle device but has a medical ECG result for continuous heart monitoring in a form of a necklace. The device has a single lead ECG analog front end that is connected to an ARM-Cortex M4 microcontroller. It uses a 4 GB memory card, rechargeable battery, and a Bluetooth Low Energy 4.0 to communicate with an Android 4.3 smartphone. The test results were taken from a 32-year-old male subject with normal heart condition. The signal acquired from the electrode placement at the backside of the neck shows Lead I waveform with 10% from the normal position amplitude value. The R-wave of every heartbeat can be seen for heart rate calculation. Therefore, it is able to do a daily heart monitoring with a lifestyle device.