Non-invasivemonitoring of fetal movements using time-frequency features of accelerometry

This paper presents a time-frequency approach for fetal movement monitoring which is based on the instantaneous amplitude (IA) and instantaneous frequency (IF) of signals collected using 3axial accelerometers placed over the maternal abdomen. Results of a feature selection method based on receiver operating characteristic analysis shows that the mean of the IAs and deviation of the Ifs outperform other features. A support vector machine based classifier which uses these 2 features exhibits a total accuracy of 96.6% with reasonably high sensitivity and specificity.