Christine O’Brien, Ph.D., an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, was recently granted $2.8 million from the NIH to develop a wearable device to track blood loss to prevent postpartum hemorrhage – the leading cause of maternal death worldwide.
The goal is to design a wearable device that tracks blood loss through measuring cardiovascular features from a novel light-based sensor that measures changes in hemoglobin and blood flow. The team proposes that this wearable device could serve as a more accurate and continuous early warning system that could potentially prevent 50% to 90% of those maternal deaths from hemorrhage when paired with adequate treatment.
