Fetal condition may change abruptly during the pregnancy period. Therefore, continuous fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) monitoring will ease the fetal well-being. An algorithm has been developed to detect R-peak for the simultaneous measurement of the fetal and maternal heart rates during pregnancy. The algorithm is based on crosscorrelation, adaptive threshold and statistical properties in the time domain. The performance achieved for the R-peak detection for the heart rate measurements shows that the model can extract R-peak for both maternal and fetal utilizing a single-lead configuration. The algorithm has been implemented into Altera’s Stratix EP1S10. Test case results showed an error percentage of around ±0.3% and ±0.5% for the R-peak detection of maternal and fetal respectively. The system is capable to run at a maximum clock frequency of 48.56 MHz, and consumed 9 633 logic elements.

Keywords: Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA), Electrocardiogram, Very high speed integrated circuit hardware description language (VHDL), Digital signal processing (DSP), Fetal heart rate.