Scientists create wearable ultrasound to continuously monitor babies in womb

A wearable ultrasound patch called UPatch enables continuous imaging of a foetus in the womb for hours and tracks foetal blood flow in real time, including movement in structures such as the umbilical cord. Current ultrasound approaches for monitoring heart rate and uterine contractions can produce many false alarms, and handheld imaging devices are limited to a small number of scans that require skilled operators. Intermittent diagnosis captures only snapshots and is typically performed in hospitals, missing information between visits. UPatch aims to capture continuous data anywhere, allowing baselines to be established for each individual and enabling analysis of changes and signal patterns to support unique diagnoses or interventions. The device is currently a proof of concept and is tethered to external electronics, with traditional ultrasound needed for initial placement.

"Scientists have created a wearable ultrasound patch that can continuously monitor babies in the womb, with the hope that such devices could aid the early detection of complications during pregnancy. The team behind the work say ultrasound-based techniques in place now have drawbacks: continuous monitoring of the baby's heart rate and contractions of the womb using current methods leads to a high rate of false alarms, while the use of more conventional handheld devices for imaging is limited to a small number of scans during pregnancy, and must be carried out by a skilled operator."

"Current diagnosis devices are intermittent that can only capture a snapshot of what's going on with the baby, said Prof Sheng Xu of Stanford University, a senior author of the work. The patients can only do such measurements in the hospital. They miss a lot of information and data between the hospital visits. By contrast, Xu said, a wearable device can capture what is happening continuously, anywhere. You don't miss any data, so that you can identify the baseline of the signals of each individual patient, analyse the change and pattern of these signals, he said, which can lead to a unique diagnose or set of interventions."

"Xu and his colleagues have created a wearable ultrasound patch that can be used for hours at a time to continuously image the foetus in the womb and track its blood flow in real time including in moving structures such as the umbilical cord. Although it is at present a proof-of-concept device that is tethered to external electronics and requires traditional ultrasound for initial placement, the team say the technology called UPatch is the first of its type."

"This paper marks a very important step [that] demonstrates how practically something like this can be done, said Dr Antoniya Georgieva, a senior author of the study from the University of Oxford. Writing in the journal Nature Biotechnology, the team reported how they used various electronic components and algorithms"

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