A health monitoring system using multiple non-contact ECG sensors for automotive drivers

Health and alert-level monitoring of automotive driver is very important to reduce the number of vehicle accidents and associated fatalities. The proposed work focuses on the development of a reliable and low-cost health monitoring system for automotive drivers. It is based on non-contact electrocardiogram (ECG) principle. Multiple signal acquisition ECG electrodes are placed on the seat and seat-belt of the automotive. The signals from the different electrodes are interfaced to simple analog and digital signal processing units through a switching logic. The frequency domain-based digital processing and the switching logic ensures that best quality ECG signal is selected for heart rate (HR) estimation. A prototype of the proposed system is build and tested on several volunteers. These tests show that the accuracy is 2 bpm. Additional tests to determine the system performance in various conditions was conducted and results reported.