Wireless data acquisition system for fetal phonocardiographic signals using Bluetooth™

Diagnosing fetal health using stethoscope is a clinically established practice. Its modern form is called fetal phonocardiography. This paper presents a BluetoothTM based wireless data acquisition system for fetal phonocardiographic signals (fPCG). The system is based on wireless acoustic sensor hardware and intelligent software for recording and display of these signals. The system’s hardware consists of an acoustic cone and a Bluetooth headset kit. The fPCG signals are detected with the help of system’s hardware and fed to a personal computer (PC) through system’s software. The system is tested by recording the fPCG signals from 33 subjects at different gestational periods. The performance of the developed system is compared with the existing ultrasound based Doppler shift technique. The results show that the overall accuracy of the system is 98%. Due to its promising results, the developed system can be efficiently used as a fetal heart rate monitoring system for long-term home care with a very high performance to cost ratio.