## 5 Conclusions  
This paper provided a review of monitoring techniques including CTG, PPG, and Doppler sound, with the emphasis on fetal electrocardiogram (FECG), to detect fetal heart rate to determine the well-being and growth of the fetus. The importance of non-invasive FECG in contrast to invasive FECG in terms of comfort to patients was mentioned and highlighted in this paper. The different electrode configurations used in NIFECG monitoring were also discussed. It was shown that NIFECG with fewer electrodes is more suitable for home use environments because the setup requires minimum preparation time, providing the essential FECG information and enhancing the comfort to the patients.  
One of the key drawbacks of current NIFECG is the use of hydrogel electrodes, which tend to degrade over time. The positioning of these electrodes may also increase the complexity for being used at home by pregnant women. These drawbacks could be overcome by the introduction of smart textile-based electrodes, which are realized using either conventional textile manufacturing methods or printing. These electrodes do not need the assistance of a hydrogel layer to provide adhesion. Instead, the garment on which the electrodes are formed provides contraction to attach the electrodes against the skin. In addition, these electrodes are realized on the correct position and therefore the complex setup process is minimized. It is suggested that future research could focus on improving the contact between smart textile electrodes and skin. This is of importance since the quality of the FECG signal is an indicator of the well-being of the fetus to diagnose any chronic diseases at an early stage of pregnancy, and thus to help in taking the essential preventive and precautionary steps on time. Moreover, electrode number and positioning need to be investigated in the context of smart textiles to provide a compromise between wearability, useability, washability, and signal quality, which is a future research direction in NIFECG monitoring using smart textile electrodes. Therefore, the deployment of smart  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c} \hline \hline
**No.** & **Method** & **Material** & **System Integration** & **Reference** \\ \hline
1. & Knitting & Stainless steel & T-shirt & [113] \\ \hline
2. & Knitting and & Stainless steel & & \\  & Embroidery & filament, nylon fabric & T-shirt & [114] \\ \hline
3. & Weaving and Knitting & Silver yarns & Chest band & [115] \\ \hline
4. & Screen printing & Silver ink & Chest band & [116] \\ \hline
5. & Electroless platting & Silver chloride & Smart garment & [117] \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 3: Some examples of smart textile ECG research.  
textile electrodes in NIFECG monitoring will play a crucial role in long-term monitoring and comfort to patients.  
It is envisioned that the future perspective of smart textiles NIFECG in medical diagnosis will not be limited for the personal use because the device is believed to benefit the patients by carrying out the measurement either at hospitals by doctors or at home by themselves. There has been an ever-increasing utilization of cloud-based computing and Internet of things (IoT). Smart textile NIFECG should be light-weight and low-cost, providing data security and enhancing data transmission rate. Through cloud computing, the smart textile-based NIFECG measurement could be wirelessly connected to other medical IoT devices or a centralized hub, enabling accessing the essential health information from different locations.  
[PERSON] wrote the paper; [PERSON] helped with revision; Both [PERSON] and [PERSON] contributed to editing the paper. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This research was funded by Nottingham Trent University strategic research theme, Medical Technologies and Advanced Materials.  
Not applicable.