Labour Monitoring in Pregnant Women using Electrocardiography and Electromyography

The continuous monitoring of maternal vital signs, particularly during labor, can be of critical importance for the health of the child and mother. We present a compact wearable electronic system that measures, in real-time, maternal heart rate using electrocardiography (ECG) signals. The heart rate is determined using moving average filters to remove the noises in the signal and using autocorrelation for the detection of periodic signals. We use electromyography (EMG) signals for calculating uterine contractions using the root mean sum of filtered signal values. The resulting system can identify heart rate in a female subject with an accuracy of ± 2.9bpm, and uterine contraction intensity within ± 5 units compared to values obtained from a gold-standard CTG machine. The system is accurate, low-cost, and portable, so that it can be deployed at primary healthcare centers in low-income countries. The system can also be used by women in the comfort of their homes, while the data collected is transferred to their doctor for analysis and diagnosis, which can bring a revolutionary change in continuous monitoring of fetal well-being during labor.