A study on the correlationship between wearable ECG and clinical ECG measurements

- Recent advances in ICT technology have transformed many of our daily lives and attracted a lot of attention to personal health. Heart beat measurement that reflects cardiac activities has been used in various fields such as exercise evaluation and psychological state evaluation for a long time, but its utilization method is limited due to its differentiation from clinical electrocardiogram. Therefore, in this study, we could observe the change of the measured signal according to the change of the distance and the position of the measuring electrodes which are non-standard electrode configuration. Based on the electric dipole model of the heart, correlation with clinical electrocardiogram could be confirmed by synthesizing multiple surface potentials measured with a shorter electrode distance than standard one. From the electromagnetic point of view, the distance between the measuring electrodes corresponds to the distance that the electric potential by the cardiac electric dipole moves, and the electric potential measured at the body surface is proportional to the moving distance of the electric potential. Therefore, it is preferable to make the distance between electrodes as long as possible, and to position the measuring electrode close to the ventricle rather than the atrium. In addition, it was found that standard electrocardiographic waveforms could be synthesized by using arithmetic sum of multiple measuring electrodes due to the relationship of electrical dipole vectors, which is obtained by dividing and positioning a plurality of measuring electrodes on a reference electrode line, such as Lead-I, Lead-II direction. Also, we obtained a significant Pearson correlation coefficient (r = 0.9113 ± 0.0169) as a result of synthetic experiments on four subjects.