Interpretation
The time for disruption of the present antiquated maternal-fetal monitoring antepartum has arrived. The required hardware and software technologies have matured and converged with the people’s readiness for telemedicine throughout the antepartum period.
Wearable products that monitor adult health and fitness do exist but are not targeted specifically towards pregnant women. Therefore, currently, no technology exists that provides information on the pregnancy physiology or the health status of the fetus or the pregnant mother. Non-wearable products that monitor aspects of fetal health exist in the consumer space. However, such devices all share common pitfalls like low fidelity ultrasound technology, very short-term (seconds to minutes) observations without data recordings and provide minimal data analytics (if any) value beyond brief entertainment and possibly perilous false reassurance.
At the same time, the cost of hardware components required to build high-quality ECG devices for this purpose has come down to such a level that continuous antepartum monitoring technology is now achievable within the price range identified in the present study. All required software components are also available.3,5–7
From physiological viewpoint, a pregnant woman and her unborn baby are intimately connected forming one single physiological system. Consequently, important information about their joint wellbeing is lost when they are not monitored together.8With one recent exception, all current devices use periodic ultrasound-based monitoring which is less precise than ECG-based monitoring and cannot provide the continuous monitoring (during maternal sleep for example) that is possible with ECG-based wearable devices.9