Development of Home Telemetry System using the Internet for High-risk Pregnancy

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In the management of the high-risk pregnancy, the long term continuous fetal heart rate (FHR) monitoring is most important to reduce the perinatal mortality and morbidity. In the perinatal center at Kagawa Medical School, with use of internet, we developed the maternal management system which connects homes and medical facilities and the network system which runs among clinics and hospitals. With this system, FHR and uterine contractions as well as fetal movements can easily and automatically be transmitted to the hospital through INTERNET from the patient's home or from other medical facilities at any time.The basic system is composed of FHR monitor system, Windows'PC and analyzing software. For the maternal management system, we developed a portable FHR monitor. This monitor is specially designed for easy-use at home. The network system is capable to be used in two ways, considering present FHR monitoring system in medical facilities. One is with the use of FHR data that is directly transmitted from FHR monitor and the other method uses FHR data from the central monitoring system. These data are automatically transmitted from patient's home or from other facilities into INTERNET as ASCII text file format through the gateway of the commercial network.The obstetrician can easily get the CTG data as E-MAIL through INTERNET from anywhere, even out side of the hospital. The CTG data are displayd on the CRT and automatically diagnosed. Using this system, it has become possible to manage the high-risk patient, not only within one hospital or in one regional community but also in any distant hospitals as we can construct network and share medical data. This system makes it possible to realize an ideal perinatal managing system.