Walid A. Zgallai, Higher Colleges of Technology, UAE

The aim of this paper is to detect fetal heart beats temporally overlapping with the transabdominally-measured QRS-complexes of the mother, non-invasively. Modified, Weighted and uterine contraction interference signal covariance matrix incorporated spectral MUSIC technique is applied. It is based on partitioning the subspace containing the ECG signal bearing the mother and fetal, and the orthogonal subspace containing the uterine contraction interference signal plus noise. This exploits the orthogonality between the signal and noise subspaces provided that the noise is additive white Gaussian. In the modified MUSIC, subsequent separation of the mother and fetal QRS-complexes is performed in their shared signal subspace.

Non-invasive, Fetal heartbeat detection, MUSIC Spectral estimation, uterine contraction, Weighted Kaiser filter.