Inspiration
True women empowerment lies in providing them life saving healthcare. Every year, nearly 213.4 million individuals experience pregnancy. More than one out of every ten babies is born prematurely throughout the world, resulting in approximately one million fatalities each year. Pregnant women with a high risk of premature birth visit the hospital more often to monitor their uterine contractions. Such visits last for days or weeks in some cases, which will take pregnant women away from their home comfort.
What it does
There is a critical need for new classes of advanced maternal monitoring systems that offer comprehensive and continuous clinical-grade vital signs measurements, advanced monitoring capabilities to support clinical decision making. It is, a rapid, reliable, low-cost, at home early detection of these vital sign complications to provide an early chance of treatment for both the mother and foetus. The chest sensor is placed under the suprasternal notch, the limb sensor is wrapped around the index finger, and the abdominal sensor is placed just below the umbilicus. The chest sensor measures maternal HR, RR, and central temperature from the patient. The limb sensor measures oxygen saturation and peripheral temperature. The abdominal sensor measures FHR and uterine contraction from the patient. When there is a labor pain detection, it will alert the user and her doctor too for a smooth delivery in high-risk pregnancies.
How we built it
The chest sensor (Fig. 1A) measures ECG, seismocardiogram (SCG), chest wall movement for respiratory rate (RR), and skin temperature, each sampled at 512, 416, 52, and 0.2 Hz, respectively. The chest sensor includes a biopotential analog front end (AFE) (MAX30001), and a clinical-grade thermometer. The limb sensor is composed of an integrated pulse oximetry module and a clinical-grade thermometer. The underside of the abdominal sensor exposes four gold electrodes and the ultrasonic transducer, which face the skin. The smart sensor collects and analyzes data and sends an alarm to the platform, which then relays the alarm to the ObGyn system for a physician to monitor the results. We propose a low-cost, easy to deploy, and reliable home uterine EHG activity monitoring framework for pregnant women with a high risk of premature birth using WBSN. The proposed framework aims to mitigate the consequences of premature birth for both the pregnant woman and the fetus. To implement the system, we will be extracting two features from EHG uterine contractions readings, namely amplitudes (which we will refer to it as peaks in our study) and frequencies. The application was built using the HTML, CSS, Javascript. Machine learning and neural networks are used to write prediction algorithms.
Challenges we ran into
Hardware part was mostly challenging. Assembly of the equipments was mostly very difficult. We tried but couldn't put it up as a whole prototype.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of the idea of how we thought of something this difficult in a period of 24 hours and almost built it. This was really a very interesting and a unique one to work upon. It was a roller coaster ride , working day and night.
What's next for Care4Her
We need to fully function it with intervention of real-time doctors. We want to implement one-to-one doctor appointments in the coming days.
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