Background The term 'Patient Empowerment' (PE) is a growing concept -so in popularity as in application -covering situations where citizens are encouraged to take an active role in the management of their own health. This concept is serving as engine power for increasing the quality of health systems, but a question is still unanswered, 'how PE will be effectively achieved?' Beyond psychological implications, empowerment of patients in daily practice relies on technology and the way it is used. Unfortunately, the heterogeneity of approaches and technologies makes difficult to have a global vision of how PE is being performed.

This letter describes a fast and very simple algorithm for estimating the fetal electrocardiogram (FECG). It is based on independent component analysis, but we substitute its computationally demanding calculations for a much simpler procedure. The resulting method consists of two steps: 1) a dimensionality reduction step and 2) a computationally light postprocessing stage used to enhance the FECG signal.

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