Maternal Prenatal Perceived Stress Shapes Maternal–Fetal Cardiac Coupling: Insights from Nonlinear Recurrence Analysis

This repository contains anonymized maternal and fetal RR interval time series derived from abdominal maternal – fetal ECG recordings acquiredwith the Monica AN24 monitor during pregnancy. The dataset includes interpolated maternal RR (mRR) and fetal RR (fRR) series obtained from thestimulation-free PRE baseline window, corresponding to approximately the first 5 minutes of each recording. Participants were recorded at rest, andfiles are organized according to exploratory prenatal perceived stress groups: LOW, MODERATE, and HIGH.Maternal prenatal perceived stress wasassessed using the 10-item Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10). The stress categories were used only as descriptive stratification levels and shouldnot be interpreted as diagnostic clinical cutoffs. All files were de-identified and renamed using anonymous participant codes.The RR series werepreprocessed by removing missing, non-positive, and implausible intervals, reconstructing time axes from cumulative RR intervals, applying artifactcorrection, and resampling the maternal and fetal RR signals to a uniform 4 Hz grid using cubic spline interpolation. These preprocessed timeseries were used to compute linear heart rate variability indices, recurrence plots, cross-recurrence analyses, and related nonlinear metrics. Therepository also includes MATLAB scripts and derived outputs required to reproduce the reported analyses and figures.