Product/Service Development

Molly Guy and Chemuttaai Lang'at of Medtronic Labs in the U.S. will lead a team seeking to redefine how pregnant women manage hypertension and how clinicians remotely monitor patients' health. Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy have overtaken hemorrhage as a main cause of maternal mortality in some sub-Saharan African settings. Management requires careful monitoring, which is problematic in settings with limited access to care. The team will assess integration of locally-appropriate wearable sensors into their existing hypertension management model of care.

Soumyadipta Acharya of Johns Hopkins University in the U.S. will develop a technology they call NeMo (neonatal monitoring), for families in low-resource settings to monitor their newborns at home to help them identify potentially severe illnesses. Infant mortality rates are highest during the first week of life, and in developing countries are largely caused by treatable diseases such as pneumonia or sepsis.

Charles Mace of Tufts University in the U.S. will develop paper-based cards to improve the collection, storage, and transport of blood samples from remote areas to diagnostic laboratories in low-resource settings. Dried blood spot cards are a low-cost and simple method for collecting and storing blood samples for analysis. However, they have a very basic design, which makes it difficult to control sample volume and elute specific types of molecules, which are needed to properly perform many diagnostic tests.

Yamile Jackson of Nurtured by Design in the U.S. will develop a digital, wearable wrap with biosensors and a smartphone application to monitor kangaroo mother care - skin-to-skin contact between mother and infant - in low-resource areas, and improve its duration and frequency. The sensors will monitor the infant's temperature, position, and heart rate, and transmit the data to a smartphone provided to the mother, and to the cloud to be monitored by healthcare teams.

Zawadi Mageni of the Ifakara Health Institute in the United Republic of Tanzania will train local shopkeepers to deliver essential medical supplies to remote areas. Delivery of health products to hard-to-reach areas is problematic due to the poor surrounding transport infrastructure, which suffers further during the rainy seasons. This often means that essential products are out of stock. However, shopkeepers in these areas, with their local knowledge and support, still regularly travel to their central suppliers to maintain their own stocks.

Ratul Narain of BEMPU Technologies in India will create a sleeve that can be simply attached to slings used for kangaroo mother care, which is a continuous skin-to-skin contact method of care for newborns suited to low-resource settings, to measure and encourage use. Kangaroo mother care is particularly beneficial for preterm and low-weight babies as it maintains their body temperature and thereby avoids hypothermia and promotes weight gain.

Syed Imran Ahmed of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Bangladesh will conduct a pilot study of a wrist-worn device that can continuously monitor blood pressure in pregnant women for the early diagnosis of pregnancy-induced hypertension, which can be dangerous for mother and baby. Hypertension is difficult to diagnose because it requires multiple measurements of blood pressure during normal activity due to daily variations. Current ambulatory methods can only take measurements over around 24 hours and lack portability.

Mitesh Thakkar and Harsh Shetty of Arthify Inc. in the U.S. will use radio-frequency identification tags (RFID) on vaccine packages that can be detected by near-field communication (NFC) now found on most smartphones to better track vaccines and improve supply chains in developing countries. They will develop an application for health workers to automatically read the tags and store the data in a cloud, which can then be used to take inventories. They will also build a website so that the data can be easily monitored by supply chain managers to analyze performance and predict demand.

Debra E. Weese-Mayer, Roozbeh Ghaffari, John A. Rogers, Matt Glucksberg, Aaron Hamvas, Mark Fisher, Bill Grobman and Casey Rand of the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago and the Center for Bio-Integrated Electronics at the Simpson & Querrey Institute, Northwestern University in the U.S. will develop a skin-like sensor for newborns that improves the value of kangaroo mother care (KMC), which is a method used to maintain skin contact with the mother to keep the baby warm.

JosÈ Guilherme Cecatti of Cemicamp in Brazil will develop a small watch-like device to measure the sleep patterns and physical activity of pregnant women to help identify very early signs of serious medical conditions such as gestational diabetes and preterm birth so they can be better treated or prevented. Some chronic diseases such as diabetes and cancer are known to be associated with disturbances in sleep and physical activity. They will study whether this is the case also for complications during pregnancy.