scholarly journals Non-Invasive Fetal Electrocardiogram Monitoring Techniques: Potential and Future Research Opportunities in Smart Textiles

Signals ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 392-412
Author(s):  
Geetika Aggarwal ◽  
Yang Wei

During the pregnancy, fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) is deployed to analyze fetal heart rate (FHR) of the fetus to indicate the growth and health of the fetus to determine any abnormalities and prevent diseases. The fetal electrocardiogram monitoring can be carried out either invasively by placing the electrodes on the scalp of the fetus, involving the skin penetration and the risk of infection, or non-invasively by recording the fetal heart rate signal from the mother’s abdomen through a placement of electrodes deploying portable, wearable devices. Non-invasive fetal electrocardiogram (NIFECG) is an evolving technology in fetal surveillance because of the comfort to the pregnant women and being achieved remotely, specifically in the unprecedented circumstances such as pandemic or COVID-19. Textiles have been at the heart of human technological progress for thousands of years, with textile developments closely tied to key inventions that have shaped societies. The relatively recent invention of smart textiles is set to push boundaries again and has already opened the potential for garments relevant to medicine, and health monitoring. This paper aims to discuss the different technologies and methods used in non-invasive fetal electrocardiogram (NIFECG) monitoring as well as the potential and future research directions of NIFECG in the smart textiles area.

2018 ◽  
Vol 119 ◽  
pp. 8-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim M.J. Verdurmen ◽  
Guy J.J. Warmerdam ◽  
Carlijn Lempersz ◽  
Alexandra D.J. Hulsenboom ◽  
Joris Renckens ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Ricky K. ◽  
Arjuna M ◽  
Sadegh Aminifar

This project develops a fetal heart rate (FHR) extraction application to analyze the fetus activity in the mother uterus. Several methods are available that can be used to detect FHR such as using the fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) that generated by fetus’ heart. Extracting FECG signals is considered a major challenge while the fetus is inside the mother uterus. Normalized Least Mean Square (NLMS) algorithm is one of adaptive filters that is chosen as adaptive filter to get FECG. Pan Tompkins algorithm is used for tracking R-peaks of heartbeat pulses of FECG signal. After detecting the RR interval a formula is used to calculate the bpm (heartbeat per minute) of FECG. Abdominal and direct FECG (ADFECG) database will be used to evaluate the implemented techniques as it has reference signal. At the end of research, calculated FHR is varied from 125.4 bpm to 130.3 bpm. When comparison is done between abdominal ECG (AECG) and direct FECG (DFECG), the error of FHR is 0.1%. The accuracy of R-peaks extraction is 100% where all R-peaks are detected by implemented techniques. MATLAB is used for signal simulations. This system will have ability to interpret the non-invasive FECG (NIFECG) database and compute its FHR.


Proceedings ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (13) ◽  
pp. 1009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tashreque Mohammed Haq ◽  
Safkat Arefin ◽  
Shamiur Rahman ◽  
Tanzilur Rahman

Here, we propose a signal processing based approach for the extraction of the fetal heart rate (FHR) from Maternal Abdominal ECG (MAECG) in a non-invasive way. Datasets from a Physionet database has been used in this study for evaluating the performance of the proposed model that performs three major tasks; preprocessing of the MAECG signal, separation of Fetal QRS complexes from that of maternal and estimation of Fetal R peak positions. The MAECG signal is first preprocessed with improved multistep filtering techniques to detect the Maternal QRS (MQRS) complexes, which are dominant in the MAECG. A reference template is then reconstructed based on MQRS locations and removed from the preprocessed signal resulting in the raw FECG. This extracted FECG is further corrected and enhanced before obtaining the Fetal R peaks. The detection of FQRS and calculation of FHR has been compared against the reference Fetal Scalp ECG. Results indicate that the approach achieved good accuracy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rik Vullings ◽  
Judith O. E. H. van Laar

Fetal monitoring is important to diagnose complications that can occur during pregnancy. If detected timely, these complications might be resolved before they lead to irreversible damage. Current fetal monitoring mainly relies on cardiotocography, the simultaneous registration of fetal heart rate and uterine activity. Unfortunately, the technology to obtain the cardiotocogram has limitations. In current clinical practice the fetal heart rate is obtained via either an invasive scalp electrode, that poses risks and can only be applied during labor and after rupture of the fetal membranes, or via non-invasive Doppler ultrasound technology that is inaccurate and suffers from loss of signal, in particular in women with high body mass, during motion, or in preterm pregnancies. In this study, transabdominal electrophysiological measurements are exploited to provide fetal heart rate non-invasively and in a more reliable manner than Doppler ultrasound. The performance of the fetal heart rate detection is determined by comparing the fetal heart rate to that obtained with an invasive scalp electrode during intrapartum monitoring. The performance is gauged by comparing it to performances mentioned in literature on Doppler ultrasound and on two commercially-available devices that are also based on transabdominal fetal electrocardiography.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document