Title: Wireless data acquisition system for fetal phonocardiographic signals using Bluetooth^™

Authors: Vijay S. Chourasia; Anil Kumar Tiwari

Addresses: The LNM Institute of Information Technology, Post Sumel, Jamdoli, Jaipur (Rajasthan), 302031, India. ' Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Rajasthan, IIT Rajasthan Camp Office, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, MBM Engineering College, Jodhpur (Rajasthan), 342 011, India

Abstract: Diagnosing fetal health using stethoscope is a clinically established practice. Its modern form is called fetal phonocardiography. This paper presents a Bluetooth^™ based wireless data acquisition system for fetal phonocardiographic signals (fPCG). The system is based on wireless acoustic sensor hardware and intelligent software for recording and display of these signals. The system's hardware consists of an acoustic cone and a Bluetooth headset kit. The fPCG signals are detected with the help of system's hardware and fed to a personal computer (PC) through system's software. The system is tested by recording the fPCG signals from 33 subjects at different gestational periods. The performance of the developed system is compared with the existing ultrasound based Doppler shift technique. The results show that the overall accuracy of the system is 98%. Due to its promising results, the developed system can be efficiently used as a fetal heart rate monitoring system for long-term home care with a very high performance to cost ratio.

Keywords: Bluetooth; fetal phonocardiography; fPCG signals; fetal heart rate; FHR; wireless data acquisition; fetal monitoring; heart rate monitoring.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCIH.2012.046997

International Journal of Computers in Healthcare, 2012 Vol.1 No.3, pp.240 - 253

Published online: 30 Oct 2014 *

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