Assessment of custom fitted heart rate sensing garments whilst undertaking everyday activities

Abstract

This study assesses the accuracy of heart rate detection using custom fit intelligent garments with integrated textile electrodes. Two single lead electrocardiograms (ECGs) where recorded from 5 subjects using wet Ag/AgCl (WE) and textile electrodes (TE). During recording the subjects were asked to perform several tasks. Offline, the ECGs recorded from the WE were examined and the number of R wave peaks for each subject where counted by a human observer. This count served as the gold standard. A computer program was used to detect R peaks from both the WE and TE. Sensitivity of each system was determined by comparing computer program based heart rates from WE and TE to the gold standard. The system with TE obtained a mean sensitivity of 76.47%. This was significantly lower than with WE (mean: 98.19%). Results indicated that the custom skin layers did not perform accurately whilst performing tasks involving movement of the trunk and limbs. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.