GENESIS

Fetal monitoring is routinely used for appraisal of the state of health of a foetus, enabling early detection of risks to its life and health and supports the doctor in decision making on optimal time and method of pregnancy termination. In general, the monitoring is based on evaluation of the fetal heart activity accomplished by recording and analysis of cardiotocographic signals. In spite of the popularity of cardiotocography, problems resulting from the necessity of providing permanent health care to all pregnant women from so called group of high risk, remain unresolved. In addition, the commonly used cardiotocographic method has relatively low sensitivity and low positive predictive value with reference to the fetal state of health. Having no other choice, permanent cardiotocographic supervision means hospitalization for the women in high risk pregnancy even if there is no direct risk to their health. At the end, costs resulting from the prolonged stay at hos-pital are significantly higher and most of the women feel physical and psychological discomfort. In case of lack of vacancies, the patients are compelled to frequent, even daily, visits to the hospital to evaluate the state of health of the baby. In many countries, such problems become quite important because of limited number of beds in hospitals and inadequate number of medical equipment.

An optimal solution seems to be introduction of such monitoring system that would allow the pregnant women to carry out the cardiotocographic examination at home, but under continuous supervision of a physician operating a single station located at a medical centre. Simultaneously, research on development of a new approach to automated interpretation of cardiotocographic records should be carried out because of its huge practical impact on the effectiveness of fetal health assessment, especially during simultaneous, telemedical monitoring of a few or several women in high-risk pregnancy.