An intelligent garment for online fetal well-being monitoring

Considered as one category of wearable systems, intelligent garments represent an opportunity for meeting special needs of various populations on well-being monitoring. In this paper, we present a new wearable system based on an intelligent garment specially designed for online monitoring of fetal movements, which are usually taken as a key indicator for fetal well-being during pregnancy. This intelligent garment is composed of the following components: (1) a garment carefully designed for enhancing pregnant women's comfort and increasing measured signal quality, (2) a network of sensors integrated into the right positions of the garment, (3) a microcontroller also integrated into the garment, permitting to merge and analyze data measured from these sensors and (4) an Android application connected to the garment, allowing the mother to visualize key information related to her baby's health. Moreover, in the frame of the wearable system, this garment is connected to both the wearer's smartphone which makes basic diagnosis on fetal well-being (local decision support system) and a medical expert system on the cloud computing platform with which clinicians can make advanced medical diagnosis. In this wearable system, the techniques of artificial intelligence have been used for extracting relevant features of fetal movements and supporting medical decisions of clinicians. Different from the existing wearable systems, both the electronic/signal issues and textile/garment design have been fully taken into account in the proposed intelligent garment and the capability of accurate fetal movement monitoring has been further enhanced by the well-designed algorithms.