Unconstrained monitoring of ECG and respiratory variation in infants with underwear during sleep using a bed-sheet electrode unit.

An approach is proposed for obtaining both electrocardiographic potential and respiratory variation signal from infants lying supine with underwear during sleep. Capacitively coupled bed-sheet electrode unit and a methodology of capacitive sensing were employed to realize the approach. A pilot device was fabricated to explore the feasibility of the approach and evaluation experiments were conducted for 5 infants aged from 43 to 174 days. The results revealed that two outputs of the developed device synchronized respectively with the reference ECG and sleep breath in all experiments. The present device appears promising for application to bedding as an unconstrained method for ECG and respiratory variation monitoring of neonates or infants during sleep.