1 Department of Pediatrics, College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University New York, New York, Department of Physics, Ramapo College Mahwah, New Jersey
The ability to monitor clinically important physiological parameters continuously represents a major advance in the technique of intensivecare medicine. In situations where there are rapid changes occurring which affect the status of the patient from minute to minute, the physician is often frustrated by a lack of continuous information.
Much of the practice of modern obstetrics is based on the continuous information available from a fetal monitoring unit. No longer is it impossible to hear the fetal heart during a contraction. A large body of systematized knowledge has been developed based on the temporal relationships between changes in the heart rate and contractions in labor.1