Advances point to promise for epidermal electrophysiological signal processing

Epidermal electrophysiological signals are indispensable in monitoring bioelectrical activities such as heartbeats, brain functions, and muscle contractions for medical diagnoses and health surveillance. Limitations like motion artifacts, skin irritation, and low permeability hinder consistent monitoring. Smart electrodes have emerged as a promising solution to these challenges.

Ye et al. discussed advancements in smart electrodes, with a particular focus on materials, structures, and algorithms. They provided a valuable cross-sectional and vertical comparison of heart, brain, eye, muscle, and multimodal fusion signals, offering insights into machine learning and deep learning algorithms for electrophysiological signal processing.

“The emerging trend of the smart epidermal electrophysiological electrode represents an essential future direction for electrophysiological signal monitoring,” said author Bowen Ji. “It has advantages in self-adaptability and solving problems such as motion artifacts, signal attenuation, and undesirable stability.”

Incorporating smart materials in electrodes facilitates self-adaptation, self-sensing, and self-healing. Moreover, the employment of microstructures, nanostructures and mesostrutures helps in adapting to diverse surfaces and conditions. Intelligent algorithms, especially deep learning, enhance the efficiency of signal processing.

Challenges persist, however, regarding stability, adaptation, and performance of materials and structures; interpretability and overall security of algorithms; and system integration of smart electrodes.

“To address all the issues, concerted efforts from all related fields are needed.,” Ji said.

The authors hope their work serves as a reference for integrating these algorithms in clinical and neuroscience research. They look to focus on integrating human-computer interaction devices with intelligent algorithms and optimizing epidermal electrodes through structural designs for high-performance smart electrodes.

Source: “Smart epidermal electrophysiological electrodes: Materials, structures, and algorithms,” by Yuanming Ye, Haochao Wang, Yanqiu Tian, Kunpeng Gao, Minghao Wang, Xuanqi Wang, Zekai Liang, Xiaoli You, Shan Gao, Dian Shao, and Bowen Ji, Nanotechnology and Precision Engineering (2023). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/10.0019678 .