Bloomlife, an imec spin-off, is showcasing BeatleIC, believed to be a prototype of the world’s first wearable five-channel electrocardiogram (ECG) chip to continuously and accurately monitor fetal heart rate and mobility, important indicators of a baby’s wellbeing. With the development of this chip, a major hurdle has been taken in the creation of a wearable ECG system that can accurately measure the fetal ECG as early as week 20 in a woman’s pregnancy.
According to the company, today’s wearable solutions are typically limited to tracking maternal health parameters, spot-checking or contraction monitoring and are not providing a real-time, continuous report of a baby’s wellness. Bloomlife’s purposely-built BeatleIC chip, which leverages imec’s unique integrated circuit (IC) technology, is allegedly the only chip on the market today that has all required characteristics to accurately track a fetus’ wellbeing indicators throughout the second half of a woman’s pregnancy.
The BeatleIC chip features a 5-channel ECG sensor to enable simultaneous recording of all perinatal health related signals, low power consumption to enable long-term and continuous use (featuring a battery lifetime of approximately one week on a coin cell), and high accuracy to enable fetal ECG data acquisition at very low amplitude levels (between 3 and 15 µVP-P)
The development of the BeatleIC was partially funded by the Flanders Agency for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (VLAIO). For more details, visit the product page.