Sense4Baby™

West Health Institute is developing wireless health solutions to dramatically lower health care costs. WHI’s first experimental medical device, Sense4Baby™, is a wirelessly-enabled fetal monitor of fetal and maternal wellness, so doctors can monitor mother and child remotely.

Women with high risk pregnancies require clinical monitoring several times each week during the last months of pregnancy, when travel for the mother can be most difficult. Sense4Baby™ enables an infrastructure independent model of care, shifting the site of monitoring from central facilities with highly trained specialists to remote outpatient clinics or even at the patient’s home.

Sense4Baby™ is projected to save a total of $1.4 billion in annual savings by improving medical outcomes; eliminating wasteful testing; improving care delivery and by bringing the test to the mother, rather than the mother to the test. It employs an innovative, small, body-worn fetal heart rate monitoring sensor that connects via Bluetooth to a smartphone or tablet. Maternal heart rate and uterus contractions are also captured. Additional maternal biomarkers can be collected from peripheral devices and entered into the smartphone. Fetal and maternal data are transmitted to a secure database in the cloud, which can be accessed and reviewed remotely by an obstetrics specialist.

The Institute recently launched a pilot research study of the Sense4Baby™ with the Carlos Slim Health Institute in Mexico.