Maternal, Newborn, and Adolescent Health

Jianjun Sun of the University of Connecticut in the U.S. is developing non-hormonal contraceptives using a fly-based ovulation assay to identify compounds that specifically block the rupture of follicles, which is required to release eggs for fertilization also in mammals. The popular female contraceptive "pill" alters the hormonal cycle and is widely used throughout the Western world. However, it can have undesirable side effects.

William Fifer of Columbia University in the U.S. is developing a non-invasive method to measure heart rate and heart rate variability in the fetus during pregnancy as a window into brain function to help warn of emerging brain abnormalities. They aim to produce charts of brain development beginning during pregnancy and continuing into early childhood that can be used in limited-resource settings for monitoring child health.

Joseph Culver of Washington University in St Louis in the U.S. is developing a portable, optical neuroimaging technology (high-density diffuse optical tomography [HD-DOT]) to monitor the effects of malnutrition on brain development in young children in low-resource settings. During the first ten years of life, the brain develops many skills such as visual and language processing, and has unique nutritional requirements.

Manish Bhardwaj of Innovators in Health in India will build a social networking platform consisting of voice messages accessed via mobile phone that is monitored by community health workers to connect small groups of young pregnant women and new mothers in India. Currently, community health workers provide home visits to help adolescent mothers combat mental health disorders. However, their capacity is limited. An additional difficulty for adolescent mothers is the lack of social networks caused by moving to new neighborhoods to live with their husbands.

Tatiana Salisbury of King's College London in the United Kingdom along with colleagues at the Royal College of Art in the United Kingdom and the Manhiça Health Research Centre in Mozambique will develop a strategy to improve the mental health of young mothers in Mozambique by adapting existing technology-based and group-based methods to teach them life skills such as parenting and social skills. Almost half of Mozambican girls have had a baby by the time they are 18 years old.

Aleksandra Perczynska from People in Need in Nepal will develop two approaches, namely mobile phone voice messaging (mobile health [mHealth]) and workshops, to improve the mental health of young mothers in Nepal. In 2016, over 15% of Nepali girls aged 15-19 years had children. These adolescents are particularly vulnerable to mental health disorders such as depression, and often have limited support from the community and their new in-laws. They will recruit young mothers and mental health workers to help design the two approaches.

Estelle Sidze of African Population and Health Research Centre in Kenya will work with adolescent mothers in Nairobi slums to develop a toolkit of information, skills, and coping mechanisms, to protect their mental health during pregnancy and early motherhood. Many girls in Nairobi slums become pregnant, but have limited knowledge about how to care for a baby, and are often excluded from their homes. They will interview adolescent mothers to find out what harms their mental health during pregnancy, what effect this has on their behavior, and how they try to cope.

Arun Shanbhag of Manipal University in India will use near field communication (NFC) tags to transform traditional bracelets worn by infants in India into portable vaccination records that better track particularly migrant communities to promote full childhood vaccination coverage. Vaccinations are recorded on paper, which are easy to lose and make it difficult for health workers to monitor children in migrant communities. They created beaded bracelets that can store vaccine records on a digital tag, and have developed a mobile application that can read the tag using an Android smartphone.

Folusho Balogun of the University of Ibadan in Nigeria will train older women who are traditionally involved in childcare in Nigeria to ensure infants in their communities are fully immunized. Many young children in Nigeria, particularly those in urban slums, are not fully immunized, or are immunized too late, leading to an unacceptably high under-five mortality rate. This is due in part to the mothers not understanding how critical immunizations are. In many African nations, the care of young children is also overseen by older women in the community such as grandmothers or neighbors.

Gershim Asiki of the African Population and Health Research Centre in Kenya will develop a mobile phone application and centralized electronic database to link birth records with immunizations to increase the coverage of BCG and polio vaccines in newborns in Kenya. Births and immunizations are initially recorded on paper and then transferred to separate electronic databases, meaning that many infants fail to receive the standard vaccinations on time.