Fetal Heart Rate Monitoring Using Photoplethysmography Techniques

Abstract

Fetus health intense care is an important aspect concerned in gynic period. Fetal heart rate (FHR) supervising is vital and has an established way of evaluating fetal wellbeing of the pregnant women throughout the gynecological period. Auscultation and electronic fetus monitoring are the two technologies available right now in the market. Auscultation uses Doppler transducer whereas electronic recording can be done by using special recording equipment (Beng in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering 56:2075–2082, 2009 [1]). Use of electrode was known to output the fetus heart recordings through optical means by photoplethysmography non-invasive technology. Doppler technique is not meant for long-term use whereas optical means are in one suggestible in terms of improvement of the results; for longer use and in this article, a 24h recording mechanism is presented with details explanation of equipment used and procedures following with 400 short recording sessions with on an average success rate of 65% for the recording period from around 20 weeks incubation. The demonstration proves that the methodology adopted is more patient-friendly and improved quality in results.