On 3 October 2024 the health-technology news site HIT Consultant published an opinion article by Dr Amit Reches, then Nuvo’s Chief Technology Officer, on where prenatal monitoring has come from and where it is going.
The trouble with the in-clinic test
He starts with the nonstress test, still the cornerstone of monitoring late in pregnancy. It is usually done in the clinic with cardiotocography (CTG), a method that has changed little since the 1950s and often needs staff to keep adjusting the sensors to hold the baby’s heart-rate trace. He notes that the one or two tests a week recommended by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in the last eight weeks weigh on patients’ money, work and family life, and that missed visits weaken care, while maternity care deserts and a shortage of OB-GYNs and midwives make access harder still.
What newer sensing adds
Some companies simply move CTG into the home: more convenient, but with the same limits. Others use newer signals, the heart’s and the womb’s own electrical activity (ECG and EHG), recorded by several synchronised wearable sensors, so that the same clinicians can oversee more sessions. For the baby’s heart, he argues that ECG combined with heart sounds (phonocardiography) gives a fuller picture and tells the mother’s heart rate from the baby’s more reliably.
Remote pregnancy monitoring … has the potential to substantially improve the delivery of prenatal care and pregnancy outcomes.
Where AI comes in
More recordings create a new bottleneck: the same number of doctors has far more data to review. He describes decision-support tools that do a first review against existing guidelines, and the next step: AI models of the kind behind today’s large language models, trained on body signals such as ECG and then tuned to smaller, specific datasets, to help find and even predict high-risk pregnancies.
How INVU works →
Reading contractions in the mother’s own heartbeat →
How INVU’s heart-rate readings compare with hospital CTG →
Nuvo’s AI-ready pregnancy dataset →
Talk to us about remote monitoring for your practice →
