Key result
A wearable integrated system for continuous fetal heart rate monitoring achieved an overall score for both accuracy and sensitivity over 90% in a limited set of pregnant women.
Why the study?
Does a wearable system and mobile application accurately monitor fetal heart rate in pregnant women?
Does a wearable system and mobile application accurately monitor fetal heart rate in pregnant women?
A novel wearable system for continuous fetal heart rate monitoring demonstrated over 90% accuracy and sensitivity in preliminary testing, potentially enabling remote and personalized pregnancy care.
Requires larger validation trials before clinical use; leaves open wearable fetal monitoring utility.
Prenatal monitoring of Fetal Heart Rate (FHR) is crucial for the prevention of fetal pathologies and unfavorable deliveries. However, the most commonly used Cardiotocographic exam can be performed only in hospital-like structures and requires the supervision of expert personnel. For this reason, a wearable system able to continuously monitor FHR would be a noticeable step towards a personalized and remote pregnancy care. Thanks to textile electrodes, miniaturized electronics, and smart devices like smartphones and tablets, we developed a wearable integrated system for everyday fetal monitoring during the last weeks of pregnancy. Pregnant women at home can use it without the need for any external support by clinicians. The transmission of FHR to a specialized medical center allows its remote analysis, exploiting advanced algorithms running on high-performance hardware able to obtain the best classification of the fetal condition. The system has been tested on a limited set of pregnant women whose fetal electrocardiogram recordings were acquired and classified, yielding an overall score for both accuracy and sensitivity over 90%. This novel approach can open a new perspective on the continuous monitoring of fetus development by enhancing the performance of regular examinations, making treatments really personalized, and reducing hospitalization or ambulatory visits.
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Signorini et al. (2018) studied Pregnancy. Wearable integrated system for fetal monitoring was evaluated on Accuracy and sensitivity of fetal electrocardiogram classification. A wearable integrated system for continuous fetal heart rate monitoring achieved an overall score for both accuracy and sensitivity over 90% in a limited set of pregnant women.
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