Preliminary Testing of Minimally Invasive pH and Carbon Dioxide Sensors for Infant Monitoring

Fetal and neonatal monitoring are used in the vast majority of labors in high income countries and less in many low and middle income countries. The purpose is to identify compromise during the birth process, related mostly to hypoxemia, which if not quickly remediated can cause neurodevelopmental abnormalities. Monitoring can be continuous or intermittent, biochemical or biophysical, focused on a wide range of physiological parameters, or limited. There have been various protocols promoted over the past 50+ years which have strengths and weaknesses - both technical and interpretive. We have shown that continued monitoring postpartum should be an integral component. Our goal here is to improve the quality of neonatal monitoring to make it widely available, inexpensive, and to have sufficient statistical performance to change and improve clinical management both before and after delivery. Here, we describe preliminary results comparing several modes of carbon dioxide and pH sensing towards integration of these sensors against standard sensors for temperature, oxygen, and heart rate.