Open Data: Valuable Resources and Opportunities for the Researchers in Fetal Cardiac Monitoring

In the scientific field, open data is one of the main milestones of the last decades, whose impact is significant and essential, especially in health-related and biomedical research. In the biomedical scenario, it allows for trustworthy benchmarking and validation of signal processing algorithms, but also for the development of collaborative innovation and faster, shared knowledge. Moreover, in the light of the open data paradigm, study reliability is higher since larger population sets are adopted. Remarkably, the impact of open data is of paramount importance also for methodologies evaluating fetal well-being, since it enables the improvement of antenatal screening strategies, but also the development of new techniques to reach that goal. Therefore, in this Chapter, open data and some related open-source tools for fetal cardiac studies are presented and detailed, highlighting their potentialities and peculiarities, thus guiding the readers towards the adoption of proper frameworks for their research. Although several new datasets are being released, more effort is needed to include unhealthy subjects and follow-up information, as they can allow testing methods on pathological conditions, thus broadening the scope to include also diagnostic purposes.