Fetal Breathing Transmission in Phonocardiographic Monitoring Telemedicine Systems

The phonocardiographic monitoring of fetal heart activity due to its passive nature enables extremely long measuring times providing thus the possibility of fetal breathing recovery. The long monitoring time is required because of the temporary appearing of breathing movement. However, the long measurement time and consequently the large amount of data to be transmitted to the hospital's computer centre may be costly on mobile phone network. To keep monitoring costs low an appropriate data compression should be applied assuring the transmission of all important features of the detected acoustic signal. The present work summarizes the results of the extension of the novel telemedicine system (1) with measurement of breathing periodicity and the achieved compression level of acquisited data. The Golomb-Rice compression is applied for lossless transmission of the segmented beat cycles considering the importance of the given segments in order to obtain the most accurate transfer of beat-to-beat time and all irregular heart sounds.