Detection of fetal kicks using body worn accelerometers during pregnancy: Trade offs between sensors number and positioning
Monitoring fetal wellbeing is key in modern obstetrics. While fetal movement is routinely used as a proxy to fetal wellbeing, accurate, noninvasive, long term monitoring of fetal movement is challenging. A few accelerometer based systems have been developed in the past few years, to tackle common issues in ultrasound measurement and enable remote, self administrated monitoring of fetal movement during pregnancy. However, many questions remain unanswered to date on the optimal setup in terms of body worn accelerometers as well as signal processing and machine learning techniques used to detect fetal movement. In this paper, we systematically analyze the trade offs between sensor number and positioning, the presence of reference accelerometers outside of the abdominal area and provide guidelines on dealing with class imbalance. Using a dataset of 15 measurements collected employing 6 three axial accelerometers we show that including a reference accelerometer on the back of the participant consistently improves fetal movement detection performance regardless of the number of sensors utilized. We also show that two accelerometers plus a reference accelerometer are sufficient for optimal results.
2016 38th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC)