Abstract
Early fetal cardiac diseases and heart abnormalities can be detected and appropriately treated by monitoring fetal health during pregnancy. Advancements in computer sciences and the technology of sensors show that is possible to monitor fetal electrocardiogram (fECG). Both signal processing and experimental aspects are needed to be investigated to monitor fECG. In this study, we aim to design and realize a non invasive fECG monitoring system. In the first part of this work, a remote study process of the electrical activity of the heart is achieved. In fact, our proposed design considers transmitting the detected signals in real time using a WiFi module and then analyzing the results on Raspberry Pi 3. As the signal acquired from the mother’s abdomen is contaminated by several noises, in the second part, we propose a method to extract the fetal electrocardiogram FECG by using Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and Wavelet Transform (WT). The proposed method was tested on real data recordings from the publicly available Physionet database. In this paper, we proposed an efficient hardware design to well monitor the heart activity. Then, we presented our adopted method for fECG extraction. The obtained results with the mentioned method show the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm and it is suggested to be used in the portable designed fECG monitoring system.
Highlights
During pregnancy, the fetus’s health condition must be monitored to detect abnormalities that could affect the heart
Many signal processing methods have been successfully applied to extract fetal electrocardiogram (fECG) and these methods were tested by using synthetic data
An efficient hardware prototype developed on Raspberry Pi3 has been deployed to operate as a wireless ECG monitoring system
Summary
The fetus’s health condition must be monitored to detect abnormalities that could affect the heart. The best technique for monitoring the fetal heart is detecting the fECG. This signal carries vital information about the cardiac function of the fetus. Most fetal diseases are discovered early in the fECG. This technique has been an interesting challenge for years in the biomedical field and in signal processing. An electrode should pass through the mother’s uterus and enter the womb to touch the fetus’s head. This procedure may cause some problems to both the mother and the fetus. The most common method nowadays is the non-invasive method and it
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