Man develops smart and portable device to monitor the heart rate of mothers and babies

Arun has a Master degree in Biomedical Engineering and worked as a patents analyst. He applied to a Social Innovation Immersion Programme when he started working on his solution to avoiding preventable deaths of mothers-to-be and babies.

The inventor built Keyar, a non-invasive cardiotocography device that monitors the heart rate of a baby in the mother’s womb and the uterine contractions of the mother-to-be. The woman wears the device around her neck and extends it out to a patch with five in-built, surface-electrode-based sensors. The patch is placed over the navel and sends data to a mobile app, to allow remote monitoring, also developed by Arun.

“Keyar is an affordable, easy to use and portable labour monitoring device for continuous monitoring of fetal heart rate and uterine contraction during the intra-partum period for low resources healthcare settings. The device monitors both the parameters, analyzes the pattern and further gives a colour-coded/sound alert if the fetus is in distress. The device also displays fetal heart rate and uterine contraction in an easy format which is interpretable by a low skilled health worker”, says on the official website.

The developer contacted St John’s Medical College Hospital, in Bengaluru, for a study to compare his results it with the global gold standard. "We are studying Keyar's performance against the gold-standard CTG machine. Preliminary results show that Keyar's performance is as good as that of the gold standard”, explained Dr Shirley George, Professor at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, St John's Medical College Hospital. A new study will be conducted.

The biggest advantage of this solution is that it is cheaper, portable, non-invasive and easy to use. Also, it allows the patient to be monitored remotely.

Arun founded his own company - Janitri Innovations. Keyar may be launched for about 576 USD, which makes it more affordable than the traditional equipment.

The entrepreneur has launched pilots in several hospitals across India and is now exploring partnerships to expand sales to Southeast Asia and Africa, where the population faces similar challenges. He hopes to get Keyar in the market in 2019.

Adapted from: https://bit.ly/2WQ66bC

More info: https://janitri.in/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVpXPmZw86I