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Objectives: This paper presents a novel wearable system for in-home and long-term fetal movement monitoring on a reliable and easily accessible basis. Material and methods: The system mainly consists of four accelerometers for fetal movement signal acquisition, a microcontroller for signal processing and an Android-based device interacting with the microcontroller via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), providing the mother with information related to the fetal movement in an intelligible way. Results: The proposed system can deliver reliable results with a specificity of 0.99 and a sensitivity of 0.77 for fetal movement time series signal classification. Conclusion: The proposed wearable system will provide a good alternative to optimize the use of medical professionals and hospital resources, and has potential applications in the field of e-Health home care. Besides, the fetal movement acceleration signals acquired with volunteers (pregnant women) helps establish an initial database for future medical analysis of sensor-recorded fetal behaviors.

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Comfort can be considered as subjective feeling, which could be affected by the external ambient, by the physical activity, and by clothing. Considering the human body heat transfer system, it mainly depends on various parameters including clothing materials, external and internal environment, etc. The purpose of the current paper is to study and establish a quantitative relationship between one of the clothing parameters, ease allowance (air gap values) and the heat transfer through the human body to clothing materials and then to the environment. The study considered clothing which is integrated with the 3D ease allowance from the anthropometric and morphological data. Such incorporating of the clothing’s 3D ease control was essential to properly manage the air space between the body and the proposed clothing thermal regulation model. In the context of thermal comfort, a clothing system consisting of the human body, an ease allowance under clothing, a layer of textile materials, and a peripheral layer adjacent to the textile material was used. For the complete system, the heat transfer from the skin to the environment, which is influenced by thermoregulation of the human body, air gap, tissue, and environmental conditions were also considered. To model and predict the heat transfer between the human body and the temperature of skin and clothes, a 3D adaptive garment which could be adjusted with ease allowance was used. In the paper, a thermoregulatory model was developed and proposed to predict the temperature and heat within clothing material, skin, and air space. Based on the result, in general the main difference in the temperature of clothing and skin from segment to segment is due to the uneven distribution of air layers under the clothing.