Electrical properties, accuracy, and multi-day performance of gelatine phantoms for electrophysiology

Gelatine based phantoms for electrophysiology are becoming widely used as they allow the controlled validation of new electrode and new instrumentation designs. The phantoms mimic the electrical properties of the human body and allow a pre-recorded electrophysiology signal to be played-out, giving a known signal for the novel electrode or instrumentation to collect. Such controlled testing is not possible with on-person experiments where the signal to be recorded is intrinsically unknown. However, despite the rising interest in gelatine based phantoms there is relatively little public information about their electrical properties and accuracy, how these vary with phantom formulation, and across both time and frequency. This paper investigates ten different phantom configurations, characterising the impedance path through the phantom and comparing this impedance path to both previously reported electrical models of Ag/AgCl electrodes placed on skin and to a model made from ex vivo porcine skin. This article shows how the electrical properties of the phantoms can be tuned using different concentrations of gelatine and of sodium chloride (NaCl) added to the mixture, and how these properties vary over the course of seven days for a.c. frequencies in the range 20-1000 Hz. The results demonstrate that gelatine phantoms can accurately mimic the frequency response properties of the body-electrode system to allow for the controlled testing of new electrode and instrumentation designs.