A study on the measurement of heart rate variability using the modified laplacian electrodes

Heart Rate Variability(HRV) is a parameter that represents monitoring variability of time intervals between R-peak in electrocardiography. HRV serves to various applications, such as indices of autonomic functions, prediction of cardiac sudden death, assessment of stress and emotional, etc. However, as measuring R-peak in ECG needs at least 3-electrodes, and it is inconvenient for end users. In this paper, we suggested the modified laplacian electrodes for measuring HRV at one-point, which are producted by MEMS fabrication and have the two circular electrodes on the pad. For optimal position and direction, we performed an experiment that compared with pearson correlation coefficient and the amplitude of signals, between standard lead II and proposed electrodes. We analyzed the HRV parameters, such as standard deviation of the NN interval(SDNN), high frequency(HF), low frequency(LF), LF/HF ratio. The result showed that the average correlation coefficient and amplitude are 0.967 and 0.685 mVpp at the position 2. The coeffiecient correlation between the standard HRV and proposed electrode-HRV is 0.999.