Father invents device to help mothers monitor fetal heartbeat at home

When David’s wife, Odelia, was pregnant with their third child, the couple was running from scurrying from one medical appointment to the next. This meant they had to arrange for babysitting, drive to the appointment, find parking, and wait for the actual fetal monitoring exam which took only several minutes – and then came another round of waiting for the physician to analyse results.

This amount of stress and anxiety led the man to cofound HeraMED, in 2018, a company that develops HeraBEAT (he is the CEO), a smartphone-based fetal heartbeat monitor for home use. The pregnant ladies can use this device to monitor their fetus’ heartbeat and share that data securely via the cloud with an authorized healthcare provider – without leaving home or office.

The system features an integrated optical sensor that extracts the signals from the mother’s heartbeat so that only the baby’s heart rate is measured. It also features an app that connects the device wirelessly to a smartphone.

HeraMED completed its IPO on the Australian Securities Exchange in December, received regulatory approvals in Australia, Israel, UK, Europe, India and Brazil, and is pending FDA’s 510k approval. Clinical trials are in progress in Israel, UK, Australia and USA.

The Mayo Clinic, one of HeraMED’s shareholders, is testing HeraBEAT as part of its OB Nest program, which relies on self-monitoring tools and other means of “demedicalising” the experience of pregnancy for women at low risk of complications.

“There are other handheld Doppler devices in the market, but they use an inferior narrow beam and it creates a substantial challenge to find the fetal heartbeat even for professionals, not to mention home users. We’ve overcome technological challenges to make the beam ultra-wide using a unique transducer, so the reading takes shorter to accomplish”, David explained.

The gadget can be bought online from 350 USD.

Adapted from: https://bit.ly/2F2T4O1

More info: https://herabeat.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bws-HEkko8