Long-term Phonocardiographic Fetal Home Monitoring for Telemedicine Systems

A novel compact method for fetal home monitoring optimized for long data acquisition time and low communication costs is presented. The method incorporates the preprocessing of disturbed acoustic signal received on the maternal abdomen. The basic idea of the preprocessing is that the detection of the systolic and diastolic sounds takes place on two separated frequency bands with autocorrelation on predicted time intervals. Measurements on 47 selected pregnant women have shown that the use of this method significantly reduces the amount of data to be transferred to the computer centre in the hospital, where only the very disturbed time periods have to be evaluated. Based on this method a new, phonocardiographic fetal telemedicine system can be built without time limitation of measurements.