Engineering a microprobe platform for minimally-invasive continuous health monitoring during labour and birth

Academic Institution: Heriot-Watt University

Academic Supervisor: Dr Michael Crichton

Industry Partner: Tommy’s Charity

PhD Student: Burhan Turgut

Start Date: 1st July 2020

Abstract

Every year around 1100 babies either die or are born severely disabled as a result of complications during birth. Improved technology approaches to meet the UK Government’s goals for healthy births could provide improved outcomes for around half of these cases. Our project seeks to develop a platform technology – a microprobe sensor – that can enable better and continuous monitoring of foetuses during labour. In foetuses, this will surpass the capability of current approaches which either measure heart rate or invasively take single point blood samples. The latter of these, foetal blood sampling (FBS), is a technically challenging technique where a small scalpel is used to place an incision in the foetus scalp, and a blood sample collected with a capillary tube. These samples then take approximately 20 minutes to obtain a result, which is only a single timepoint which may not indicate the subsequent state of the foetus. Enabling a continuous measure of these markers would open the potential for more timely intervention and treatment during labour.

Our project is centred around developing a microprobe for the extraction of clinically-valuable markers of foetal distress in a minimally-invasive, and continuous manner. We seek to do this using microfabrication expertise, tissue mechanics and clinical expertise, for a user-centric technology.

This project brings together clinical need and engineering expertise, spanning two SRPe universities (Heriot-Watt University, HWU and the University of Edinburgh, UoE) and a national clinical-focussed charity, Tommy’s. The focus for Tommy’s is to reduce miscarriage, still birth and premature birth (and the associated baby/maternal complications associated with these) by funding high quality clinically-focussed research, such as this project. By partnering on this project we increase the expertise in engineering medical technologies and ensure the strongest potential for an impactful project.