Hardware Implementation of Constant Monitoring System of Fetal Heart Sounds

Auscultation is one of the fetal monitoring methods. Since the acoustic signal acquired from the pregnant woman’s abdomen contains a lot of noise, it is necessary to perform noise reduction. Software implementation of the noise reduction is not effective for real-time monitoring because the processing time is longer than the recording time of the heart sound. In this work, fractal dimension analysis, which accounts for the majority of the heartbeat detection process, was implemented as hardware on an FPGA to realize constant real-time monitoring.