title: Detection of fetal kicks using body-worn accelerometers during pregnancy: Trade-offs between sensors number and positioning.
abstract: Monitoring fetal wellbeing is key in modern obstetrics. While fetal movement is routinely used as a proxy to fetal wellbeing, accurate, noninvasive, long-term monitoring of fetal movement is challenging. A few accelerometer-based systems have been developed in the past few years, to tackle common issues in ultrasound measurement and enable remote, self-administrated monitoring of fetal movement during pregnancy. However, many questions remain unanswered to date on the optimal setup in terms of body-worn accelerometers as well as signal processing and machine learning techniques used to detect fetal movement. In this paper, we systematically analyze the trade-offs between sensor number and positioning, the presence of reference accelerometers outside of the abdominal area and provide guidelines on dealing with class imbalance. Using a dataset of 15 measurements collected employing 6 three-axial accelerometers we show that including a reference accelerometer on the back of the participant consistently improves fetal movement detection performance regardless of the number of sensors utilized. We also show that two accelerometers plus a reference accelerometer are sufficient for optimal results.
authors.forename: Marco
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Altini
authors.forename: Patrick
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Mullan
authors.forename: Michiel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rooijakkers
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Gradl
authors.forename: Julien
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Penders
authors.forename: Nele
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Geusens
authors.forename: Lars
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Grieten
authors.forename: Bjoern
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Eskofier
mesh_terms: D061725:Accelerometry / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods; D005260:Female; D005323:Fetal Monitoring / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D005324:Fetal Movement; D006801:Humans; D011247:Pregnancy; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted