Photoplethysmography (PPG) is an optoelectronic technique
for measuring and recording changes in the volume of body parts.
These changes are associated with each heart beat and acquired by
pulse oximetry. Fetal heart rate (FHR) monitoring using PPG is a
challenging task since the acquired signals present the pattern of both
fetal and maternal hearts. The effect of maternal component, noise
and artifacts on fetal component makes the separation of FHR very
difficult. In this paper, we study the applicability of independent
component analysis (lCA) to FHR detection using PPG. The study
was conducted using emulated signals to mimic the pulsation nature
of both maternal and fetal hearts. The outcome of this experiment
shows encouraging results in terms of the extraction ability oflCA,
which can perform well even when fetal-to-maternal signal-to-noise
ratio (SIY~) drops to -276 dB
