Empowering the disempowered: Remote pregnancy monitoring for hard-to-reach populations

Empowering the disempowered: Remote pregnancy monitoring for hard-to-reach populations Tobias R. Kollmann, Professor at Dalhousie University, and Nima Aghaeepour, Professor at Stanford University, examine remote pregnancy monitoring for hard-to-reach populations. Preventing adverse pregnancy outcomes requires knowing which pregnancies are at risk. Remote monitoring offers a transformative solution. Crisis: Adverse pregnancy and birth outcomes are the longest-standing, deadliest medical disaster of human history (1). Specifically, the leading cause of death in childhood is preterm birth (PTB; < 37 weeks of gestational age (GA)). Currently, one baby is born prematurely every 2 seconds, resulting in 15 million preterm babies in the world every year; 1 million of them die around birth from preterm birth-related complications (2).