Simplified, off-the-person electrocardiogram (ECG) sensor designs enable the introduction into everyday life of continuous, and pervasive ECG acquisition paradigms. This significantly augments the potential of applications such as remote health monitoring, emotion assessment, and ECG biometrics, among others. We accomplish this by reducing the number of contact points to just two, making use of a groundless setting. Additionally, acquisition is made at the hand palms or fingers through dry electrodes. In this paper, we describe
such a system, comparing it against a standard 12-lead, medical-grade ECG system. Our analysis is based on the morphological similarity between individual heartbeat waveforms, as well as the general similarity between the synchronized time series. We show that the ECG signal acquired at the hands with our sensor is highly correlated with lead I from the standard system.