Detecting heart rates of expectant mothers in their 3rd trimester

Abstract

The on-going research work involved in filtering abdominal electrocardiogram (aECG) and detecting maternal QRS complexes to calculate maternal heart rates will give this research a lead to further detect fetal heart rates. The monitoring of maternal and fetal heart rates help detect fetal hypoxia early in the evolution to acidosis. The maternal ECG is strongly distorted by artifacts like baseline wander and power line interference. This paper briefly recaps the implementation of some methods to remove these noise so as to calculate the maternal heart rate (R-R interval). Kaiser FIR High pass filter has been proved to be an efficient method for the removal of baseline wander from the aECG signal. A Notch filter with a bandwidth of 2Hz was designed in Matlab using FDA tool to remove the 50 Hz power line interference. In the proposed algorithm a RR interval is calculated, based on threshold detection of the R peaks which in turns calculates the maternal heart rates. The method is validated using 19 recorded signals taken from the Physionet non-invasive aECG database.