Robust Fetal Heart Rate Tracking through Fetal Electrocardiography (ECG) and Photoplethysmography (PPG) Fusion *

Fetal electrocardiogram (fECG) or photoplethysmogram (fPPG) devices are being developed for fetal heart rate (FHR) monitoring. However, deep tissue sensing is challenged by low fetal signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Data quality is easily degraded by motion, or interference from maternal tissues and data losses can happen due to communication faults. In this paper, we propose to combine fECG and fPPG measurements in order to increase robustness against such dynamic challenges and increase FHR estimation accuracy. To the author’s knowledge the fusion of two sensory data types (fECG, fPPG) has not been investigated for FHR tracking purposes in the literature. The proposed methods are evaluated on real-world data captured from gold-standard large pregnant animal experiments. A particle filtering algorithm with sensor fusion in the measurement likelihood, called KUBAI, is used to estimate FHR. Fusion of PPG&ECG data resulted in 36.6% improvement in root-mean-square-error (RMSE) and 20.3% improvement in R
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correlation between estimated and reference FHR values compared to single sensor-type (PPG-only or ECG-only) data. We demonstrate that using different types of sensory data improves the robustness and accuracy of FHR tracking.