Advances in fetal heart rate monitoring using smart phones

It has been shown that the rate of preterm birth in remote and rural populations in Australia is more than twice of those in the metropolitan population, and that increased access to quality antenatal care in such communities leads to a significant improvement. This paper describes a system that supports remote fetal heart rate monitoring, thus providing a technique that addresses this need for better remote antenatal care. The application involves a smart phone, a portable Doppler ultrasound device, a remote back-end server and network connectivity provided by the global system for mobile communications (GSM) and general packet radio service (GPRS) networks. Algorithms for fetal heart rate detection were adapted to cater for the lower processing powers on the smart phone. The accuracy of this detection algorithm in the mobile application was evaluated and found to be highly comparable to that of a MATLAB implementation on a PC.