In Depth Baby Product Reviews Led by a Pediatrician

Monitoring Your Baby

Your caregiver and pregnancy will determine how often you get an ultrasound
Monitoring Your Baby
Credit: Cathy Yeulet © 123rf.com
Sunday October 20, 2019

While most moms and babies will not suffer complications during the last month of pregnancy, some might need a little closer monitoring for potential problems if they are considered at higher risk than your average pregnancy for whatever reason. With the baby developing quickly and losing valuable space, it can be of the utmost importance that you keep tabs on her progress and the conditions inside your body.

Your caregiver might consider using more frequent ultrasounds to track growth and development as well as movement and amniotic fluid volume. Your doctor might also consider doing a non-stress test or biophysical profile depending on your particular symptoms or information gathered from other tests. A non-stress test will monitor the baby's heart rate to ensure a healthy level of variability of acceleration and deceleration of the baby's heartbeat. If the test indicates little or no variability, it could suggest that the baby is suffering from abnormal stress, and further investigations should be done. A biophysical profile is a scoring method of assessing fetal well-being by considering various factors from breathing movements and muscular tone to amniotic fluid volume and movement.

Your caregiver should be able to use these test results to determine how the baby is managing inside the womb and if any potential complications could be happening or are about to occur. While not an exact science, many of these monitor options can help you feel better about how the baby is doing in the womb.

we tested nine of the most highly regarded and popular sound...
We tested nine of the most highly regarded and popular sound monitors to find out which is the very best.
Credit: BabyGearLab Staff
Once you are used to keeping tabs on your baby inside the womb, you may find an urge to do so once they are born. The following reviews may pique your interest for use when your baby is sleeping:

Reference Sources

  1. American Pregnancy Association - Week 34
  1. WebMD - Your Pregnancy Week by Week - 31-34
  1. Expecting 411

Honest, objective reviews. Led by a Pediatrician.

BabyGearLab was founded by a Pediatrician Mom with a mission to provide a reliable, independent, source of information to new parents. Our experts have tested thousands of baby and kids products to share key performance, health, and safety findings. We spend tens of thousands of dollars crash testing car seats to inform our ratings. And, we combine our review work with gobs of expert parenting advice. To assure complete independence, we buy all the products we test ourselves. No sponsored content. No ads. Just real, honest, side-by-side testing by people who care.

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