Fetal movements recording system using accelerometer sensor

Abstract

One of the compelling challenges in modern obstetrics is the monitoring fetal wellbeing. Physicians are gradually becoming cognizant of the relationship between fetal activity, movement, welfare, and future developmental progress. Previous works have developed few accelerometer-based systems to tackle issues related to ultrasound measurement, the provision of remote s1pport and self-managed monitoring of fetal movement during pregnancy. Though, many research questions on the optimal setup in terms of body-worn accelerometers, as well as signal processing and machine learning techniques used to detect fetal movement, are still open. In this work, a new fetal movement system recorder has been proposed. The proposed system has six accelerometer sensors and ARDUINO microcontroller. The device which is interfaced with the MATLAB signal process tool has been designed to record, display and store relevant sets of fetal movements. The sensors are to be placed on the maternal abdomen to record and process physical signals originating from the fetal. Comparison of data recorded from fetal movements with ultrasound and maternal perception technique gave the following results. An accuracy of 59.78%, 85.87%,and 97.83% was achieved using the maternal perception technique, fetal movement recording system, and ultrasound respectively. The findings show that the proposed fetal movement recording system has a better accuracy rate than maternal perception technique, and can be compared with ultrasound.