Implementation of foetal e-health monitoring system through biotelemetry

Abstract

Continuous foetal monitoring of physiological signals is of particular importance for early detection of complexities related to the foetus or the mother's health. The available conventional methods of monitoring mostly perform off-line analysis and restrict the mobility of subjects within a hospital or a room. Hence, the aim of this paper is to develop a foetal e-health monitoring system using mobile phones and wireless sensors for providing advanced healthcare services in the home environment. The system is tested by recording the real-time Foetal Phonocardiography (fPCG) signals from 15 subjects with different gestational periods. The performance of the developed system is compared with the existing ultrasound based Doppler shift technique, ensuring an overall accuracy of 98% of the developed system. The developed framework is non-invasive, cost-effective and simple enough to be used in home care application. It offers advanced healthcare facilities even to the pregnant women living in rural areas and avoids their unnecessary visits at the healthcare centres.

An Overview of Maternity healthcare Monitoring in Developing Nations

“…The proposed approach tracks uterine contractions non-invasively using body-worn wireless sensor network and notifies a smartphone if the results are above or below the normal limit. Chourasia & Tiwari, 2012 Propose a fetal tracker for electronic health utilizing smart mobile devices and wearable network to deliver cutting-edge healthcare in a home setting. Nitulescu et al, 2015, Presents a framework for employing sensor networks to monitor pregnant women at risk for early labour.…”

Exploring mobile health in a private online social network

“…This work can also be compared with Chourasia and Tiwari (2012), where foetal e-health system is developed to monitor data at local places instead of the clinic. Comparatively, our work has more advantages as the monitored data is accessible to larger concerned entities through a private social network.…”

“…Example case studies related to healthcare can also be found. Chourasia and Tiwari (2012) develop a foetal e-health monitoring system using mobile phones and wireless sensors for providing advanced healthcare services in rural areas to avoid unnecessary visits to healthcare centres. For this purpose, the authors develop biotelemetry system for foetal e-health monitoring involving mobile phone with the help of a clinical staff.…”