A Portable NeuECG Monitoring System for Cardiac Sympathetic Nerve Activity Assessment

Cardiac sympathetic nerve activity is closely related to arrhythmia. Simultaneous non-invasive recording of electrocardiogram and skin sympathetic nerve activity (neuECG) is a new method for sympathetic nervous system assessment. This study presented a data acquisition and analysis system based on neuECG for real-time assessment of cardiac sympathetic nerve activity. Owing to weak skin sympathetic nerve activity (SKNA) signals, signal-acquisition equipment is designed, which is characteristics of low-noise, high-precision and portable. Through a series of experiment, the practicality and reliability of this system are verified. Results show that there are good linear relationships between SKNA signals collected by the proposed system and the normal system (PowerLab), the correlation coefficient is 0.96. Compared with the main neuECG monitoring systems, the proposed system has advantages such as smaller volume and much lower background noise. The system realized the effective and portable evaluation of the cardiac sympathetic activity, in order to identify the risk of arrhythmia as soon as possible.