A Novel Approach for Removing the Hook Effect Artefact from Electrical Bioimpedance Spectroscopy Measurements

Very often in Electrical Bioimpedance (EBI) spectroscopy measurements the presence of stray capacitances creates a measurement artefact commonly known as Hook Effect. Such an artefact creates a hook-alike deviation of the EBI data noticeable when representing the measurement on the impedance plane. Such Hook Effect is noticeable at high frequencies but it also causes a data deviation at lower measurement frequencies. In order to perform any accurate analysis of the EBI spectroscopy data, the influence of the Hook Effect must be removed. An established method to compensate the hook effect is the well known Td compensation, which consists on multiplying the obtained spectrum, Zmeas(ω) by a complex exponential in the form of exp[jωTd]. Such a method cannot correct entirely the Hook Effect since the hook-alike deviation occurs a broad frequency range in both magnitude and phase of the measured impedance, and by using a scalar value for Td. First a scalar only modifies the phase of the measured impedance and second, a single value can truly corrects the Hook Effect only at a single frequency. In addition, the process to select a value for the scalar Td by an iterative process with the aim to obtain the best Cole fitting lacks solid scientific grounds. In this work the Td compensation method is revisited and a modified approach for correcting the Hook Effect including a novel method for selecting the correcting values is proposed. The initial validation results confirm that the proposed method entirely corrects the Hook Effect at all frequencies.