Inexpensive and flexible nanographene-based electrodes for ubiquitous electrocardiogram monitoring

Abstract

Flexible electronics is one of the fundamental technologies for the development of electronic skin, implant wearables, or ubiquitous biosensing. In this context, graphene-derived materials have attracted great interest due to their unique properties to fulfill the demands of these applications. Here we report a simple one-step method for the fabrication of electrophysical electrodes based on the photothermal production of porous nanographene structures on the surface of flexible polyimide substrates. This approach constitutes an inexpensive alternative to the commercial medical electrodes, leading to a lower and much more stable skin–electrode contact resistance and providing comparable signal transduction. This technology has been framed inside the IoT paradigm through the development of a denoising and signal classification clustering algorithm suitable for its implementation in wearable devices. The experiments have shown promising achievements regarding noise reduction, increasing the crest factor ~3.7 dB, as well as for the over 90% heart rate-monitoring accuracy.