Abstract

Fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) signal contains potentially precise information that could assist clinicians in making more appropriate and timely decisions during pregnancy period and labour. Fetal condition may change abruptly during the pregnancy period. Therefore, continuous FECG monitoring will ease the fetal well-being. This paper describes an implementation of an economical real time distant fetal electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring system. A new algorithm using adaptive linear network (ADALINE) has been developed to extract fetal ECG from composite ECG (maternal and fetal ECG). A graphical user interface (GUI) program is written in matlab to detect the changes in extracted fetal ECG by different values of momentum, learning rate and initial weights used in the network. The total system comprises of an acquisition and a networking part. The acquisition part acquires ECG signal through electrodes and then amplifies the weak ECG signal by an amplifier and filter out noises. The networking part is in the form of a Java based client/server pair application. This part is utilizing Internet protocols (IP), commercial software and low cost component to transmit ECG data to physicians for monitoring, diagnosis and patients care at a significantly low cost, regardless of patient’s location.

Key words: Fetal electrocardiogram (FECG), annotated electrocardiogram(AECG), fetal heart rate (FHR), QRS, neural network, adaptive linear network (ADALINE).