Wearable Fetal ECG Monitoring System from Abdominal Electrocardiography Recording

Abstract

Fetal electrocardiography (ECG) monitoring during pregnancy can provide crucial information for assessing the fetus’s health status and making timely decisions. This paper proposes a portable ECG monitoring system to record the abdominal ECG (AECG) of the pregnant woman, comprising both maternal ECG (MECG) and fetal ECG (FECG), which could be applied to fetal heart rate (FHR) monitoring at the home setting. The ECG monitoring system is based on data acquisition circuits, data transmission module, and signal analysis platform, which consists of low input-referred noise, high input impedance, and high resolution. The combination of the adaptive dual threshold (ADT) and the independent component analysis (ICA) algorithm is employed to extract the FECG from the AECG signals. To validate the performance of the proposed system, AECG is recorded and analyzed of pregnant women in three different postures (supine, seated, and standing). The result shows that the proposed system can record the AECG in different postures with good signal quality and high accuracy in fetal ECG and heart rate information. Sensitivity (Se), positive predictive accuracy (PPV), accuracy (ACC), and their harmonic mean (F1) are utilized as the metrics to evaluate the performance of the fetal QRS (fQRS) complexes extraction. The average Se, PPV, ACC, and F1 score are 99.62%, 97.90%, 97.40%, and 98.66% for the fQRS complexes extraction,, respectively. This paper shows the proposed system has a promising application in fetal health monitoring.

How Wearable Sensors Can Support the Research on Foetal and Pregnancy Outcomes: A Scoping Review

“…Nine studies described the application of wearable sensors to collect information about foetal parameters [ 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 ]. These studies are described in Table 1 , together with a summary of their design and population, wearable device used, and main findings.…”

“…Their experimental results suggested that the device—which was also integrated with an app for Android smartphones—might be a feasible, non-invasive, monitoring system of foetal ECGs in real time [ 19 ]. Zhang and colleagues proposed a similar monitoring system with three electrodes, which was able to obtain foetal heart rate from the recorded abdominal ECG of pregnant women [ 20 ]. Their validation study was conducted on three pregnant women, showing good signal quality and high accuracy in three different postures (supine, seated, and standing) [ 20 ].…”

“…Zhang and colleagues proposed a similar monitoring system with three electrodes, which was able to obtain foetal heart rate from the recorded abdominal ECG of pregnant women [ 20 ]. Their validation study was conducted on three pregnant women, showing good signal quality and high accuracy in three different postures (supine, seated, and standing) [ 20 ]. Mhajna and colleagues added to this knowledge, evaluating the performance of a wearable belt containing 8 electrical sensors and 4 acoustic sensors [ 17 ].…”

“…In the first instance, included studies clearly demonstrated that non-invasive sensors, usually placed on the mother’s abdomen, are capable of detecting foetal heart rate and movements [ 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 19 , 20 ]. The task was not without objective difficulties, which arose when it became essential to differentiate between signals coming from the mother’s body and those coming from the foetus.…”

ASCNet-ECG: Deep Autoencoder based Attention aware Skip Connection network for ECG filtering

“…These wearable technologies are widely adopted and mainly based on ECG processing techniques. Several devices have been developed for ECG analysis such as Zhang et al [5] used a wearable device for fetal ECG monitoring, Wu et al [6] introduced IoT based ECG monitoring system and integrated on a T-shirt, and Beach et al [7] developed wristworn ECG monitoring system based on IoT systems. Thus, ECG analysis plays an important role.…”