Fetal Monitoring by Using TV Game Machine at Patient's Home

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Fetal monitoring at patients' home has been safely and economically launched by utilizing most popular TV game machines, combined with newly developed compact-sized and telemetric fetal monitor, which sends 3 MHz continuous wave (c-w) Doppler signal and simultaneously obtaining the uterine contraction with the pocketable size of 77X57X21 mm, transmitting 55-710 MHz FM waves with the antenna which is simultaneously converted to the lead wire of Doppler signals.By electronically separating the patient's terminal from game machines, safe and inexpensive monitoring has been established. In practical use, after preparing and activating the terminal, patients should simply insert the cassette case into the receptacle of TV game machine, containing FM receiver , A/D converter, additional PROM, clock and other circuits on a compact single board. Fetal rate measurement has been afforded by the continuous calculation of autocorrelation coefficients, with the specially programmed ROM on the board. By these simple procedures, TV machine can be converted into a fetal home monitoring device, continuously designating the fetal heart rate patterns and uterine contractions.Most expensive portion of the system development consists in the programming of software including the translation of complicated data processing software into the specific game machine language. The display of the biomedical data into TV game machine also causes some difficulties in expressing the slow moving fetal heart rate into the specifically moving "game scene" and "characters". Total cost of the system can be estimated minimum and the safety of the patients can be easily assured, even by adding some other functions such as a data-storage, or a bidirectional data-transferring between the patient's home and hospital. As a conclusion, cost effective fetal monitoring system at the patients' home has been established by modifying a Home TV game machine with a telemetric compact front end.