This article was co-authored by wikiHow staff writer, Dev Murphy, MA. Dev Murphy is a wikiHow Staff Writer with experience working as a teacher, ghostwriter, copyeditor, and illustrator. She loves writing how-to articles because she loves learning new things and because she believes knowledge should be free and accessible to the world. Dev's creative writing and visual art have been featured in many venues online and in print. When she is not writing for wikiHow, she is drawing pictures, making perfume, or writing hybrid poems. Dev earned her MA in English Literature from Ohio University in 2017. She lives in Pittsburgh with her cat, Nick.
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You're lying in the hospital bed, hooked up to a contraction monitor, eager to say hello to your new little one. The doctors and nurses can interpret the graphs on the monitor for you, but you still might want to know how to interpret the machine's readouts on your own so you can check up on your baby yourself. We've assembled a guide to contraction monitors: how to read them, plus an in-depth look at the different types of monitors and how to tell which one is right for you. Read it all, below.