Rapid Fabrication Technique for Dry Electrocardiography Electrodes Using Carbon Nanotube/Polydimethylsiloxane Composite

Polymer-based dry and flexible electrodes are becoming increasingly popular in wearable healthcare for long-term electrocardiography (ECG) monitoring due to their comfort, biocompatibility, and gel-free operation. In this study, electrodes are prepared for ECG measurement using a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and multi-walled conductive carbon nanotube (CNT)-based composite. The homogeneous dispersion of CNTs in PDMS is crucial for determining the electrical performance of the composite, and to accomplish this uniform dispersion, a combination of ultrasonication and a high-shear homogeneous dispersion technique is employed. This combination approach resulted in a rapid composite preparation method that took approximately 2–3 h to complete. The performance of the fabricated ECG electrodes was evaluated by measuring the ECG signal and compared to commercially available wet Ag/AgCl ECG electrodes. The ECG signal of the CNT/PDMS composite electrode with CNT content of 6 wt.% demonstrated optimal correlation of 0.9729 with the ECG signal measured from the Ag/AgCl electrode. The CNT/PDMS composite-based dry electrodes can be easily fabricated by manufacturing techniques, suggesting a possible benefit of cost and time reduction in mass production.