A baby is stillborn every 16 seconds, leading to heartbreak for more than two million families worldwide per year. Despite advances in care for babies after birth, progress towards reducing the number of stillbirths is lagging behind. Over 50 per cent of stillbirths are associated with a reduction in the baby’s movements in the womb but there is currently no way to track a baby’s movements at home.
Prof Nowlan, together with her collaborators Prof Ravi Vaidyanathan, Prof Christoph Lees & Mr Abhishek Ghosh (Imperial College London) and Prof Fionnuala McAuliffe (UCD) has been awarded a contract as part of Wellcome Leap’s In Utero programme, which aims to create the scalable capacity to measure, model and predict gestational development with a primary goal to reduce stillbirth rates by half. Wellcome Leap is a non-profit organisation founded by the Wellcome Trust to accelerate and increase the number of breakthroughs in human health globally. The team aims to determine how their monitor (called the FM monitor) can be used to measure a baby’s health in the womb. The FM monitor could potentially identify babies who are at risk of stillbirth and will also offer reassurance when the baby is healthy, thereby decreasing the rates of unnecessary induction of labour and early delivery.
The story was featured on the UCD website.
Developmental Biomechanics 