A4 Refereed article in a conference publication
A Novel Wearable-Based Fetal Movement Localization System Using Machine Learning
Authors: Kazemi, Kianoosh; Feli, Mohammad; Anzanpour, Arman; Likitalo, Susanna; Beni, Valerio; Jonasson, Christian; Axelin, Anna; Liljeberg, Pasi
Editors: N/A
Conference name: IEEE Sensors
Publication year: 2025
Journal: Proceedings of IEEE Sensors
Book title : 2025 IEEE Sensors
ISBN: 979-8-3315-4468-3
eISBN: 979-8-3315-4467-6
ISSN: 1930-0395
eISSN: 2168-9229
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/SENSORS59705.2025.11330703
Publication's open availability at the time of reporting: No Open Access
Publication channel's open availability : No Open Access publication channel
Web address : https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11330703
Fetal movement counting is a key indicator of fetal health. While ultrasound is the hospital gold standard, its use is limited to a short time due to potential tissue harm. This work presents a novel wearable system for fetal movement localization using a 6-channel piezoelectric sensor array integrated into a maternal abdominal garment. A comprehensive phantom-based testbed with a robotic arm simulates fetal kicks across predefined abdominal zones. Multi-domain features were extracted from sen-sor signals and used to train various machine learning models for kick localization. The proposed system achieved a classification accuracy of 87.4 % (F1-score: 86.5 %) in localizing fetal kicks across nine distinct regions of the maternal abdomen using a multilayer perceptron. These findings demonstrate the potential of sensor-machine learning fusion for spatial fetal monitoring and early detection of complications in non-clinical environments.
Funding information in the publication:
This work is supported by the Newlife project, which receives funding from the EU Chips Joint Undertaking (Grant Agreement No. 101095792).