Imec chip: monitors fetal health

Imec, and it’s spin-off Bloomlife, have prototyped a wearable 5-channel ECG chip to continuously monitor fetal heart rate and mobility, two important indicators of a baby’s wellbeing.

With the development of this chip, a major hurdle has been taken in the creation of a wearable ECG system that can accurately measure the fetal ECG as early as week 20 in a woman’s pregnancy.

Today’s wearable solutions are typically limited to tracking maternal health parameters, spot-checking or contraction monitoring and are not providing a real-time, continuous report of a baby’s wellness.

Thev BeatleIC  is the only chip on the market today that has all required characteristics to accurately track a fetus’ wellbeing indicators – such as heart rate and mobility – throughout the second half of a woman’s pregnancy.

Existing chips either consume too much energy to be of any practical use in wearable solutions or are not capable of tracking the right fetal parameters.

The BeatleIC  features –

• A 5-channel ECG sensor to enable simultaneous recording of all perinatal health related signals
• Low power consumption to enable long-term and continuous use (featuring a battery lifetime of approximately one week on a coin cell)
• High accuracy to enable fetal ECG data acquisition at very low amplitude levels (between 3 and 15µV peak-peak)