A Wearable Device for Evaluation of Relative Position, Force, and Duration of Fetal Movement for Pregnant Woman Care

Fetal movement (FM) is one of the important indexes of clinical observations on fetal activities (such as the position, duration and relative force of FM), and as demand for the home monitoring of pregnant women grows increasingly, a wearable device for the long-term monitoring of fetal movement has drawn more and more attention. This study integrated multi-point IMU sensing with an innovative real-time classification method to build a device for the long-term monitoring of fetal movement, including the evaluation of the relative position, force and duration. In order to validate the sensitivity and clinical feasibility of the device, this study performed phantom simulation tests and clinical tests on 13 pregnant women. The phantom test results showed that the device had high accuracy (>90.3%) in recognizing 12 FM positions, the relative force had high correlation (
${R}^{2}>0.98$
), and the duration of FM had a low error percentage (<10%). The clinical test results showed that the number of FMs detected by this method was coincident with the pregnant women’s self-perceptions, and the questionnaire result showed that the pregnant women highly accepted this device.