Comprehensive pregnancy monitoring with a network of wireless, soft, and flexible sensors in high- and low-resource health settings
Dennis Ryu, Dong Hyun Kim, Joan T. Price, Jong Yoon Lee, Ha Uk Chung, E D Allen, Jessica Walter, Hyoyoung Jeong, Jingyue Cao, Е В Куликова, Hajar Abu‐Zayed, Rachel Lee, Knute L. Martell, Michael Zhang, Brianna R. Kampmeier, Marc Hill, Joo Hee Lee, Edward Kim, Yerim Park, Hokyung Jang, Hany Arafa, Claire Liu, Maureen Chisembele, Bellington Vwalika, Ntazana Sindano, M. Bridget Spelke, Amy S. Paller, Ashish Premkumar, William A. Grobman, Jeffrey S. A. Stringer, John A. Rogers, Shuai Xu
Abstract
Significance Monitoring vital signs for laboring women and their fetuses is foundational to the delivery of obstetrical care; however, monitoring platforms for pregnancy have undergone little innovation over the last several decades with many low-income settings lacking basic access. We report a new time-synchronized, flexible, and wireless sensor system applicable across the entire continuum of antepartum and postpartum care that provides continuous, comprehensive, and noninvasive monitoring (heart rate, respiratory rate, and pulse oxygenation) compatible with a wide range of mobile devices. This system offers advanced features such as continuous blood pressure, uterine electrohysterography, and automated body position classification. We further demonstrate the performance of this new system among pregnant individuals ( n = 576) in both high-resource settings and low-resource care settings.