  Fetal movement count monitoring is one of the most commonly used methods of
assessing fetal well-being. While few methods are available to monitor fetal
movements, they consist of several adverse qualities such as unreliability as
well as the inability to be conducted in a non-clinical setting. Therefore,
this research was conducted to design a complete system that will enable
pregnant mothers to monitor fetal movement at home. This system consists of a
non-invasive, non-transmitting sensor unit that can be fabricated at a low
cost. An accelerometer was utilized as the primary sensor and a
micro-controller based circuit was implemented. Clinical testing was conducted
utilizing this sensor unit. Two phases of clinical testing procedures were done
and readings from more than 120 pregnant mothers were taking. Validation was
done by conducting an abdominal ultrasound scan which was utilized as the
ground truth during the second phase of the clinical testing procedure. A
clinical survey was also conducted in parallel with clinical testings in order
to improve the sensor unit as well as to improve the final system. Four
different signal processing algorithms were implemented on the data set and the
performance of each was compared with each other. Consequently, the most
feasible as well as the best performing algorithm was determined and it was
utilized in the final system. Furthermore, a mobile application was also
developed to be used with the sensor unit by pregnant mothers. Finally, a
complete end to end method to monitor fetal movement in a non-clinical setting
was presented by the proposed system.
