Fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) signal contains potentially precise information that could assist clinicians in making more appropriate and timely decisions during labor. The ultimate reason for the interest in FECG signal analysis is in clinical diagnosis and biomedical applications. The extraction and detection of the FECG signal from composite abdominal signals with powerful and advance methodologies are becoming very important requirements in fetal monitoring. The purpose of this review paper is to illustrate the various methodologies and developed algorithms on FECG signal detection and analysis to provide efficient and effective ways of understanding the FECG signal and its nature for fetal monitoring. A comparative study has been carried out to show the performance and accuracy of various methods of FECG signal analysis for fetal monitoring. Finally, this paper further focused some of the hardware implementations using electrical signals for monitoring the fetal heart rate. This paper opens up a passage for researchers, physicians, and end users to advocate an excellent understanding of FECG signal and its analysis procedures for fetal heart rate monitoring system.

Electromyography gives an electrical representation of neuromuscular activation associated with a contracting muscle. The electromyography signal acquires noise while travelling though different media. The wavelet transform is employed for removing noise from surface electromyography (SEMG) and higher order statistics are applied for analysing the signal. With the appropriate choice of wavelet, it is possible to remove interference noise (denoise) effectively in order to analyse the SEMG. Daubechies wavelets (db2, db4, db5, db6, db8), symmlet (sym4, sym5) and the orthogonal Meyer (dmey) wavelet can efficiently remove noise from the recorded SEMG signals. However, the most effective wavelet for SEMG denoising is chosen by calculating the root mean square difference and signal-to-noise ratio values. Results for both root mean square difference and signal-to-noise ratio show that wavelet db2 performs denoising best out of the wavelets. Furthermore, the higher order statistics method is applied for SEMG signal analysis because of its unique properties when applied to random time series, such as parameter estimation, testing of Gaussianity and linearity, deterministic and nondeterministic signal detection etc. Gaussianity and linearity tests as part of higher order statistics are conducted to understand changes in muscle contraction and to quantify the effectiveness of the noise removal process. According to the results, the SEMG signal becomes less Gaussian and more linear with increased force.

No abstract

An algorithm based on digital filtering, adaptive thresholding, statistical properties in the time domain, and differencing of local maxima and minima has been developed for the simultaneous measurement of the fetal and maternal heart rates from the maternal abdominal electrocardiogram during pregnancy and labor for ambulatory monitoring. A microcontroller-based system has been used to implement the algorithm in real-time. A Doppler ultrasound fetal monitor was used for statistical comparison on five volunteers with low risk pregnancies, between 35 and 40 weeks of gestation. Results showed an average percent root mean square difference of 5.32% and linear correlation coefficient from 0.84 to 0.93. The fetal heart rate curves remained inside a +/- 5-beats-per-minute limit relative to the reference ultrasound method for 84.1% of the time.

Problem statement: The social demands for the Quality Of Life (QOL) are increasing with the exponentially expanding silver generation. To improve the QOL of the disabled and elderly people, robotic researchers and biomedical engineers have been trying to combine their techniques into the rehabilitation systems. Various biomedical signals (biosignals) acquired from a specialized tissue, organ, or cell system like the nervous system are the driving force for the entire system. Examples of biosignals include Electro-Encephalogram (EEG), Electrooculogram (EOG), Electroneurogram (ENG) and (EMG). Approach: Among the biosignals, the research on EMG signal processing and controlling is currently expanding in various directions. EMG signal based research is ongoing for the development of simple, robust, user friendly, efficient interfacing devices/systems for the disabled. The advancement can be observed in the area of robotic devices, prosthesis limb, exoskeleton, wearable computer, I/O for virtual reality games and physical exercise equipments. An EMG signal based graphical controller or interfacing system enables the physically disabled to use word processing programs, other personal computer software and internet. Results: Depending on the application, the acquired and processed signals need to be classified for interpreting into mechanical force or machine/computer command. Conclusion: This study focused on the advances and improvements on different methodologies used for EMG signal classification with their efficiency, flexibility and applications. This review will be beneficial to the EMG signal researchers as a reference and comparison study of EMG classifier. For the development of robust, flexible and efficient applications, this study opened a pathway to the researchers in performing future comparative studies between different EMG classification methods

EMG signal based research is ongoing for the development of simple, robust, user friendly, efficient interfacing devices/systems for the disabled. The advancement can be observed in the area of robotic devices, prosthesis limb, exoskeleton, wearable computer, I/O for virtual reality games and physical exercise equipments. Additionally, electromyography (EMG) signals can also be applied in the field of human computer interaction (HCI) system. This paper represents the detection of different predefined hand motions (left, right, up and down) using artificial neural network (ANN). A backpropagation (BP) network with Levenberg-Marquardt training algorithm has been utilized for the classification of EMG signals. The conventional and most effective time and timefrequency based feature set is utilized for the training of neural network. The obtained results show that the designed network is able to recognize hand movements with satisfied classification efficiency in average of 88.4%. Furthermore, when the trained network tested on unknown data set, it successfully identify the movement types.

<p><em>A single series resonant converter has been designed to balance the voltage level of a storage battery for electric vehicles. The proposed design has been simulated and verified by using two 100F supercapacitors instate of the conventional rechargeable battery. A voltage monitoring circuit detects the voltage condition of the individual capacitor and sends the voltage status to the control circuit for action. A technique has been developed to control a set of switches to transfer the current between the capacitor to balance the voltage level. The MATLAB simulated result shows the balancing circuit decreases the voltage difference between the two supercapacitors from 200 mV to 0V in 140 seconds, which is less than the existing methods. This fast voltage balancing technique can be used in the battery management system or electric vehicles for long lasting the battery life.</em></p><p><em> </em></p><strong><em>Keywords</em></strong><em>: Voltage balancing; electric vehicles; supercapacitor; battery; series resonant converter</em>

No abstract