About This Project

We are studying pregnant women with hypertension. Hypertension is a cause of many dangerous outcomes in expectant mothers. We have designed a smartphone based platform to remotely monitor women in pregnancy. Our goal is to identify pregnancies with clinically dangerous blood pressures sooner to prevent poor pregnancy outcomes.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Standard prenatal care in the US involves a series of diagnostic testing and high-frequency clinic visits. High-risk pregnancies in particular (ie. chronic hypertension, gestational diabetes), require intensive physician-patient interaction.

Digital health technology has the potential to change the paradigm of how prenatal care is delivered. Therefore, we have developed a novel system to monitor pregnancies using modern digital tools. These have potential to not only enhance care provided to patients, but to also improve efficiency and communication.

We previously presented our feasibility study at the ACOG 2015 conference

What is the significance of this project?

Mobile health technology may be especially well-suited to provide value during the prenatal period. First, there appears to be an unmet demand for reliable information during pregnancy. Second, less than 4% of all obstetric websites were created by or sponsored by physicians or midwives. Third, mobile health technology has the potential to provide validated educational material in a more timely manner than current standard of care. Finally, mobile health technology may allow the provider to monitor weight and blood pressure remotely, thus eliminating some in-office visits. Ideally, remote monitoring may lead to early identification of abnormal gestational weight gain or elevated blood pressure leading to improved maternal and newborn health outcomes.

What are the goals of the project?

The main goal is to determine if it is feasibile to use a digital blood pressure cuff and weight scale to remotely monitor and augment prenatal care in a woman with chronic hypertension. Other goals will be to measure patient safety and clinical outcomes for prenatal care that is accompanied by digital health technology.

We plan on selecting 10-15 patients with chronic hypertension who start their pregnancy care at The George Washington University. The patients will receive a smartphone app and electronic blood pressure cuff and weight scale. We will ask the patients to use the devices regularly for the duration of their pregnancy.

Any abnormal values will be identified based on our algorithm that screens for problems like preeclampsia and excessive weight gain.