Wearable Intrapartum Fetal Hypoxia Detection Device

Arun Agarwal of Janitri Innovations Private Ltd in India will test a low-cost, wearable device that monitors fetal heart rate and uterine contractions during labor and automatically alerts health workers when the fetus is deprived of oxygen, which is a major cause of neonatal death in India. Existing methods are expensive and require skilled medical professionals to operate them and analyze the results. This means they are not used during the majority of births in India. The device uses multiple surface electrodes for monitoring and they will evaluate different noise removal filters and signal amplifiers, and build algorithms to analyze the data and detect fetal hypoxia. The value of their device will be compared with existing methods using 100 pregnant women during labor.