Bluetooth for your unborn baby

An inexpensive and accurate Bluetooth fetal heart rate monitoring system has been developed by researchers in India. Vijay Chourasia of the LNM Institute of Information Technology and Anil Kumar Tiwari of the Indian Institute of Technology Rajasthan explain how fetal phonocardiography is the modern equivalent of the stethoscope in prenatal baby care. The team adapted this system to be Bluetooth enabled so that fetal heart monitoring can be carried out without repeated intervention, and data can be analyzed and easily access with just a personal computer. The researchers tested their system on the babies of 33 women at different stages of gestation and compared the data with that obtained by the ultrasound-based Doppler shift technique. The Bluetooth system shows a very high level of accuracy -- 98 percent. Using Bluetooth avoids cables and the system has a low power consumption, making it portable and easy for mothers-to-be to use.