Paris: Passive and continuous fetal heart monitoring system

Abstract

Abstract The fetal heart rate and the fetal heart position are two important indicators of the fetus’ health condition. However, most of the fetal heart monitors lack the ability to detect fetal heart position. Moreover, the active fetal heart monitors based on the ultrasound and radio frequency signals could cause concerns about their influence on the fetus thus are not suitable for continuous fetal heart monitoring. To address these issues, we propose Paris, a passive and continuous fetal heart monitoring system that i) passively senses the audible fetal heart sound to eliminate the radiation; ii) extracts the fetal heart rate and the fetal heart position from the audible fetal heart sound to support a complete fetal health assessment; iii) performs continuous fetal heart monitoring with a portable device. We evaluated Paris on 16 pregnant volunteers in a time span of 6 months. The result shows that Paris can measure the fetal heartbeat with an average error of 4.3 beats per minute, and localize the fetal heart with an accuracy as high as 100 % in a range of 33 m m .