A modified algorithm for maternal heart rate detection using RR interval

This research work proposes an improved algorithm to extract maternal heart rate from an ECG measured of the mother´s abdomen. Recently various research efforts have been devoted to this field. The most recent ones include filtering and threshold methods, wavelet methods, neural networks and others. Each of these methods has different effectiveness and weaknesses. In spite of the fact that their performance is quite apt, the main weakness is that these methods are threshold dependent. Recent developments resulted in threshold free detection of heart rate that involves fixed length RR moving interval, calculated on the basis of normal maximum and minimum heart rate. In the proposed algorithm, we update the length of RR moving interval every time a peak is detected, based on the average maternal heart rate. The effectiveness of this algorithm lies in the fact that it uses optimized RR interval length, which is more capable of detecting a peak towards the end of the ECG which was left undetected using fixed length RR interval algorithm. This algorithm is implemented using MATLAB. The results showed that our proposed approach achieved higher sensitivity compared to the fixed length RR interval approach.