Wireless feto-maternal vital sign monitoring and follow-up for resource limited setting

Maternal and neonatal mortality related to childbirth is one of the big challenges of the developing world and its reduction is a key international development goal. One of the reasons for the deaths is poor quality or lack of monitoring on the important vital sign of a laboring mother and the fetus. In one hand the current system requires trained professionals and their committed effort to capture and analyze required vital sign regularly and manually, and in the other it needs expensive, hard to maintain, and electric grid dependent monitoring devices.  For instance; Routine manual collection of the feto-maternal vital sign will take more than half of their time and effort according to our survey analysis in Jimma University Specialized Hospital. Many of the defacto feto-maternal monitoring instruments such as Cardiotocography (CTG) have remained out of reach in developing countries. Hospitals and healthcare institutions in these countries seeking a better and innovative solution to reduce cost of ownership, error in manual feto-maternal vital sign collection, and workout burnout and maintainability. To bridge this gap, we trying to : (I). Create assistive intelligence to replace the labor-intensive, monotonous, time-consuming and error-prone way of collecting vital sings of the laboring mother and the fetus with the goal to ensure global access in low-resource setting, and (II). Enable continuous monitoring of vital signs during labor for the wellbeing of the mother and the fetus.  Albite, the type and availability of: (I). Sensors used for vital sign data collection in the healthcare setting are becoming enormous while their price becoming cheap, (II). General-purpose microcontrollers which has the capability to interpret and send the data collected from the sensors wirelessly are becoming broadly available and less costly, (III). Intelligent machine learning algorithms for making sense of the collected healthcare data using classification, clustering and pattern analysis are became effective and finally (IV) smart mobile devices to visualize the interpreted data mobile phones and tablets are becoming ubiquitous, no such vital sign monitoring device comprising and leveraging the above listed facts exist  to our knowledge.  Our idea is to construct a wireless feto-maternal vital sign monitoring and alerting system for low-resource setting, in which sensors are attached to a laboring mother non-invasively collects vital sign data in real-time, being processed by the rechargeable battery powered microprocessor and later sent for visualization in a wireless manner for the health care professional or a central nurse station. The widely accepted feto-maternal health status indicators aka vital signs are Maternal Blood Pressure, Uterine Contraction, Maternal Temperature, Maternal Heart Rate, Cervical Dilatation and Fetal Heart Rate. Apart from Cervical Dilation all indicators are considered in this project, and yet the later can be easily integrated to the proposed device in the future upgrades. The device has two modules, in which the module classification is based on the body where the sensors are attached for vital sign collection. In the first module maternal temperature, heart rate and blood pressure sensors are put together with a microcontroller on the armpit, tipping finger or ear and upper arm or wrist respectively, while on the second module Uterine Contraction and Fetal Heart sensors are placed on the lower abdomen of the mother. The time series data collected by the sensors are first stored in the data-logging module before it’s sent to a real-time database for analysis and visualization, this averts data loss in case of wireless communication failure, then a visualization software will query the data from the real-time database, analyze  and graphically represent it in a way that the health care professionals are capable of understanding it, these includes charts, graphs and numerical representations of all the collected vital signs.  The visualization is based on the WHO standard known as the partogram which is a composite graphical depiction of key data during labor. The visualization can be viewed by via smart phones, computers or tables in real-time in a wireless manner. Furthermore, the software system can alert the healthcare professional if the vital sign measurements of the mother and fetus are out of the normal range, so that a proper action is taken on time.