Lullaby: A Novel Algorithm to Extract Fetal QRS in Real Time Using Periodic Trend Feature

A fetal heart rate (fHR) is an important indicator for the monitoring of fetal cardiac health and development. The widely used method based on ultrasound; however, is not continuous and often requires an expert to perform; thus, it is mostly used in clinics during checkups. The advances in wearable technology have paved the way for the home assessment of the fHR via the extraction of the mother's abdominal electrocardiogram (aECG) acquired by novel patches. Several methods have been developed for such; however, the computation is either too slow for real-time monitoring or too heavy to be performed in a wearable. In this letter, we develop and validate the Lullaby algorithm—a novel method for fetal QRS extraction from the aECG. The results showed that Lullaby is almost seven times faster than the existing methods with a better F1-score of 0.815, holding promise to transform perinatal monitoring.