Closing Meeting of the GreenElectro Project: Green Electrodes for Sustainable Electrophysiology

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This meeting marked the end of a two-year project, funded by the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR) of the Generalitat de Catalunya, under the Climate Change 2023 call.

GreenELECTRO began in January 2024 with a clear purpose: to address the environmental challenges associated with the production and disposal of single-use Ag/AgCl electrodes for electrocardiography (ECG), by proposing and developing a novel bio-based alternative. Specifically, it replaced the components of the Ag/AgCl electrode with the highest environmental impact with a conductive nanocellulose-based material, also developed within the project.

Over these months, an interdisciplinary effort was made to demonstrate that it was possible to develop more sustainable ECG electrodes without compromising their functionality, combining knowledge from very different yet highly complementary disciplines: the development of plant-based materials, technology and device manufacturing, data analysis and functional validation, and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to quantify environmental impact. This complementarity allowed the team to learn from one another and approach the challenge from a much more global perspective.

This project was a collaborative effort between four Catalan research groups:

• GAB Group, Institute of Microelectronics of Barcelona (IMB-CNM, CSIC): fabrication of the sustainable electrode, physico-chemical and electrical characterisation, characterisation of the skin-electrode interface, and clinical usability assessment.

• BIMATEC group, University of Girona (UdG): development and characterisation of the conductive nanocellulose film.

• BIOSPIN group, Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC): validation of the sustainable electrodes through testing and characterisation of the electrode signal.

• UNESCO Chair in Life Cycle and Climate Change, ESCI-UPF: environmental impact assessment of the developed electrodes, evaluating a hypothetical industrial scenario and comparing it with state-of-the-art Ag/AgCl electrodes.

During the final meeting, the partners presented their respective work and addressed the remaining steps to close the project, including the preparation of scientific papers.

The meeting was attended by Pere Fullana, Director of the UNESCO Chair in Life Cycle and Climate Change at ESCI-UPF. Maria Iordanoglou, researcher of the Chair, attended the meeting virtually.

GreenELECTRO stands as a promising step towards more sustainable clinical diagnostics. It highlights the importance of upscaling in LCA for decision-making around novel technologies.

This research was funded by the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR) of the Generalitat de Catalunya, under the Climate Change 2023 call, for the “Green Electrodes for Sustainable Electrophysiology” (GreenELECTRO) project: 2023 CLIMA 00075.