Design and evaluation of a novel wireless three-pad ECG system for generating conventional 12-lead signals

Electrocardiography (ECG) is a widely accepted approach for monitoring of cardiac activity and clinical diagnosis of heart diseases. In order to make ECG systems portable, easy to setup, comfortable to patients and tolerant of artifacts, wireless single-pad ECG systems have been developed. To tackle the problems raised by wireless single-pad ECG systems, we propose an upgraded version, the wireless three-pad ECG system (W3ECG). W3ECG furthers the pad design idea of the single-pad approach. We add two more pads to the W3ECG to gain spatial variety of heart activity. Signals obtained from these three pads, plus their placement information, make it possible to synthesize conventional 12-lead ECG signals. We provide one example of pad placement and evaluate its performance by examining ECG data of four patients available from online database. Feasibility test of our selected pad placement positions show comparable results with respect to the EASI lead system. Experimental results also exhibit high correlations between synthesized and directly observed 12-lead signals (9 out of 12 cross-correlation coefficients higher than 0.75).