Monitoring the fetal heart rate variability during labor

In respect to the main goal of our ongoing work for estimating the heart rate variability (HRV) from fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) signals for monitoring the health of the fetus, we investigate in this paper the possibility of extracting the fetal heart rate variability (HRV) directly from the abdominal composite recordings. Our proposed approach is based on a combination of two techniques: Periodic Component Analysis (PiCA) and recursive least square (RLS) adaptive filtering. The Fetal HRV of the estimated FECG signal is compared to a reference value extracted from an FECG signal recorded by using a spiral electrode attached directly to the fetal scalp. The results obtained show that the fetal HRV can be directly evaluated from the abdominal composite recordings without the need of recording an external reference signal.