Certified Cardiographic Technician (CCT) Practice Exam 2026 – Your All-in-One Guide to Exam Success!

Somatic tremor artifact in Holter recordings is commonly associated with electrodes being placed over muscle. This is due to the electrical activity generated by muscle contractions, which can interfere with the heart's electrical signals being recorded. When electrodes are positioned over areas with significant muscle movement, such as the chest muscles, the resulting electrical signals can create noise in the ECG trace, leading to tremors in the recorded data.

Placing electrodes over muscle can introduce variability in the waveforms that the Holter monitor captures; as muscles contract and relax, the electrical activity from these muscles can be much stronger than the heart's signals, resulting in distortion of the cardiac data.

In contrast, while issues related to grounding or securing stress loops could potentially introduce other types of artifacts, they do not create the specific type of somatic tremor artifact associated with muscle activity as directly as the placement of electrodes over muscle does.