Sensors for Fetal and Neonatal Monitoring

The clinical care of the fetus and the newborn baby has advanced significantly over the last two decades and sensor science and technology have played their parts in this. In fact, there has been a concentration of effort from multidisciplinary groups to develop new technologies suited to the task of improving the care of the fetus and the newborn baby that can be traced back to the mid 1960s [1–6]. As a result of this effort sensors have emerged for both diagnostic and therapeutic monitoring purposes and great ingenuity has been used to solve difficult problems at the interface between sensor and signal. Nevertheless, despite the successes, many problems still remain to be solved.