Impedance spectroscopy of conductive commercial hydrogels for electromyography and electroencephalography

In biomedical applications such as the electroencephalogram, electrocardiogram and electromyogram, usually conductive hydrogels are applied to the skin providing a skin–electrode layer, with the aim of lowering contact impedance and improving the signal/noise ratio. It is important to know the electrical behavior of these materials, obtaining reliable values of their conductivity. It can be extracted by the whole cell impedance, which is affected not only by the bulk but also by the surface properties. The aim of the present work is to characterize the impedance of some currently available conductive hydrogels in the frequency range 5 Hz–1 MHz. For this purpose we have designed a novel cell, with silver electrodes, optical detection of the gap and guard ring. In this paper the results are compared with those obtained by means of a commercial cell with stainless steel electrodes, without a guard ring. In order to extract the different contributions of the bulk and the interface, we fitted the experimental data with a very simple model: the bulk properties are described by a single RC-parallel, whereas the interface is represented by a constant phase element.