Characterization of a Novel Carbonized Foam Electrode for Wearable Bio-potential Recording

A novel dry disposable electrode using carbonized foam as conductive material is presented. The conductive material is flexible and the manufacturing of it is inexpensive. In this paper, the preparation of the conductive material and the electrical properties of the electrode are investigated. A test protocol is designed to compare the in-vitro impedance, skin-electrode interface and the signal quality of the proposed electrode with that of the wet Ag/AgCl electrode. Experimental results reveal that the carbonized foam has good flexibility and conductivity. The proposed electrode can acquire ECG signal of promising signal quality when compared with Ag/AgCl electrode in the case of static and motion. Furthermore, raw data with less power line interference was observed by proposed electrodes without noise suppression circuits or algorithms. All these make the novel electrode a promising candidate for wearable bio-potential recording.