Design and implementation of wireless heart monitor for expectant mothers 3rd trimester

Abstract

A low cost Maternal and Fetal Heart Rate (MFHR) monitor is introduced in an attempt reduce or eliminate hypoxic episodes well before the development of fetal asphyxia. MFHR moni ring is sensitive and detects fetal hypoxia early in the evolution acidosis. The abdominal electrocardiogram (AECG) is the recording of the cardiac activity of both the mother and the fetus. The main challenge is extract the fetal ECG, which is strongly dis rted by maternal component of dominating energy and artifacts like baseline wander and power-line interference which were effectively preprocessed and filtered by using a Kaiser FIR filter having a SNR ratio of 13.68, filter order of 298 and a Notch filter (fc = 50 Hz) with a bandwidth of 2 Hz respectively. Our endeavor has been design this MFHR moni ring device using a smartphone. This system continuously moni rs the patient's AECG data especially in the 3 rd trimester. For the ongoing research work the maternal AECG signals were taken from the Physionet non-invasive ECG database. The AECG file is transferred from the PC a microcontroller ATMEGA32A which is interfaced a Blue oth module. Data is then transferred wirelessly via Blue oth the phone. The smartphone contains an application that displays data received from the Blue oth module interfaced with a plotter application. This Blue oth Plotter application plots the ECG waveforms of the content on the phone. Various inferences were effectively made based upon the ECG graphs produced on the phone, thus giving the doc rs an alert about the patient's and Fetal ECG information. Further research will examine the real time patient 's data from the hospital assigned us.