Maternal, Newborn, and Adolescent Health

According to WHO every year 15 million babies born preterm and the number is rising. Over 1 million babies die annually due to preterm. Key to treatment and prevention to preterm labor is early diagnosis. Existing expensive devices or devices which requires skilled professionals do not meet the criteria’s and performance in resource poor settings. Fetal heart rate and contractions monitoring is important during third trimester. Premature contractions or abnormal fetal heart rate can lead to complications like stillbirth, preterm birth and low birth weight baby.

Scale-up and evaluation of the Family Networks (FaNS) program for children with developmental disorders

Globally, 221 million women desire to prevent pregnancies. Developing countries face 99% of the 287000 annual maternal deaths, 30% can be prevented through family planning. Mother’s well being and pregnancy outcomes depend on pregnancy spacing, access to contraceptives improves public health outcomes, thus alleviates poverty. However barriers to access modern contraception exist including lack of knowledge, poor supply chain, as well as lack of choice. Young unmarried girls most affected.

Perinatal asphyxic encephalopathy (PAE) causes one million deaths and innumerable cases of cerebral palsy pa, Therapeutic hypothermia (TH) interventions, although proven and widely used in high-income economies (H-I), are not available in LM-I settings because of the high unit cost ($3K - $25Kt), or even if they are available in hospitals are inaccessible: huge numbers of PAE newborns die due to the impossibility of transporting babies to hospital before the 6 hrs therapeutic window closes.

Worldwide, 155 million young children are stunted placing them at risk for mortality or long-term health and developmental consequences.(1) Fetal growth restriction has been shown to be the leading risk factor for stunting later in life.(2) Various nutrition strategies have been employed globally including the use of small quantity lipid-based nutrient supplements (SQ-LNS). However, trials using the current formulations of maternal SQ-LNS during the pregnancy period have not produced overwhelming evidence for positive birth anthropometric outcomes.

This is a randomized controlled trial of prenatal and postpartum supplementation with probiotics and long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids together with psychosocial counseling to enhance child cognition at 6-months of age. The supplement consists of 10^9 CFU Bifidobacterium lactis DR 10 and 80mg long chain PUFA to pregnant and lactating mothers to ameliorate gut microbiota and cognitive development of their children.

Newborns who are considered high-risk, particularly those born preterm, low birth weight (LBW), or who develop illnesses early in life, often face significant nutrition and/or developmental challenges. While more high-risk infants are now surviving thanks in part to the increasing development of neonatal intensive care units (NICUs), very few follow-up programmes exist to ensure these infants receive the on-going care needed upon discharge from hospital.

The Mama Ambassador Program (MAP) is an initiative of Brick by Brick Uganda’s Babies and Mothers Alive (BAMA) Program to improve support for the 2,000 adolescent mothers each year in Uganda’s Rakai and Kyotera Districts. Through use of the BAMA Program’s existing community midwives and model mothers, Mama Ambassadors, the project will specifically identify, track, and provide both institutional and monthly peer-group support for adolescent mothers at Rakai Hospital to improve their well-being and stimulate their infants’ early brain development.

Sepsis and pneumonia cause 28% of infant mortality; early intervention saves lives. In India however, critical babies are often discharged to uneducated homes where parents miss early signs. The govt’s home care programs (ASHA, ANM) for high-risk babies require significant manpower and have in-frequent visits. Working with Indian Govt (NHM) and UNICEF officials, we are developing CareCradle: a home based remote monitoring system for high-risk infants. Daily, a single button push triggers measurement of the baby’s weight, temperature and records a 5-min video.

This project aims to improve the utilization of maternal, newborn, and child health (MNCH) data collected from a national program called RapidSMS in Rwanda. Since 2009, this program has employed community health workers (CHWs) across the country to collect health data on a mobile phone, sent via SMS to a central database. RapidSMS collects a large amount of data on MNCH daily, but these data are not optimally being utilized to inform health service delivery.