Maternal, Newborn, and Adolescent Health

Muthupandian Ashokkumar at the University of Melbourne in Australia, along with Francesca Cavalieri, Meifang Zhou, and Srinvas Mettu, will produce edible microballoons made from protein that contain essential nutrients for adding to common foods to combat malnutrition in mothers and infants. Encapsulating the nutrients, rather than adding them directly to food, helps keep them stable and promotes their absorption in the body. It can also mask unpleasant tastes, and control the timing and location of nutrient release, which can increase their performance.

Lyndon Paul of Vissot Co Ltd in Cambodia will reduce production costs for their nutritional wafer biscuits, which are made from a micronutrient-fortified fish powder, to help treat severe acute malnutrition in children and prevent malnutrition in young children and pregnant women in Cambodia. Acute and chronic malnutrition are a major public health concern in Cambodia. They previously developed a fortified fish powder and showed that it could replace milk in food for infants and was effective at reducing malnutrition.

Abhijit Das of Arogya Medtech Pvt. Ltd. in India will develop a device - CEREBROS - that is a modular unit combining electroencephalography (EEG) and near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) together with an Internet of Things (IoT) component incorporating a telemonitoring platform. This system enables continuous remote monitoring of cerebral hypoxia and seizures and early detection and management of hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) at point-of-care. The device is in the form of a wearable cap for neonates.

Balaji Teegala from BRUN Health Pvt. Ltd. in India will develop a Doppler stethoscope - Acousta - that acts both as a standard annular Y-shaped stethoscope and as a Doppler stethoscope. The problem in auscultating the fetal heart to identify birth asphyxia among other fetal morbidities is the difficulty, skill, and training needed while using a regular stethoscope. This is mitigated by active sensing systems like the fetal Doppler systems or cardiotocographs. However, these systems are burdensome to carry in addition to a stethoscope.

This research aims to analyze the relationship between a conditional cash transfer program and the child's health, considering two generations of the families and using two different approaches: econometric analysis and data mining algorithms. By analyzing the long term impacts of Bolsa Familia program on future generations' health performance, the project will investigate if a child who was born in a family whose grandparents received the cash transfer is in better health conditions than a similar child born in a family whose grandparents did not receive the same benefit.

Infectious diseases may have only transitory impacts on pregnant mothers, but they can have lasting impacts on children. Can public interventions mitigate these impacts? This project aims to identify how exposure to localized epidemiological risk factors in the fetal period influences developmental outcomes for children through the early years of life. The researchers propose to evaluate in what extent the access to primary health care and social welfare programs mitigate negative impacts in child development.

Identifying the preventable causes and performing early risk stratification of pregnant women are instrumental to develop strategies to prevent and reduce preterm birth (PTB). The ability to identify at-risk pregnancies and to enroll women in prevention strategies has been difficult due to complexity of associated risk factors.

The proposal will develop a platform for the analysis and visualization of data that will allow managers, public servants and other stakeholders involved in the Mãe Coruja Program at Pernambuco state (PMCP) to extract strategic information to improve the intervention. The focus will be on the implementation and actual enforcement of public policies, considering the high gestational risk and sexually transmitted infections (STI). Currently, health databases are for consultations only.

Does air pollution affect the rates of stillbirths, congenital malformations and neonatal mortality? This study aims to answer this question by merging the child health data collected within the 100 Million Brazilian Cohort from Cidacs with high-resolved satellite-derived data on air pollution to establish critical ambient air pollution thresholds for preventing adverse birth outcomes and malformations based on concentrations of fine particles, PM 2.5.

The study is aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of Mãe Coruja intervention in reducing low birthweight and preterm birth. By using appropriate statistical methods, the study will use the Cidacs dataset combined with the data from Mãe Coruja program to carry out the quasi-experimental study. With the support of machine learning techniques, the project will also Identify social, economic, geographic and environmental conditions that are associated with the outcomes.