The University of Notre Dame is a critical partner in a new multi-university research consortium selected by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Making Obstetrics Care Smart (MOCS) program to eliminate dangerous guesswork in the delivery room. The project, named OMEGA (Optical, Mechanical, and Electrical Global Assessment of fetal hypoxia), will create a sophisticated, noninvasive wearable monitoring system to assess fetal distress and its underlying causes in real time.
Thomas O’Sullivan, the Frank M. Freimann Collegiate Professor of Biomedical Electronics, and his team are leading a pivotal piece of the OMEGA architecture: a wearable optical sensing technology required to monitor maternal and fetal vitals safely deep within tissue. Scott Howard, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Siddharth Joshi, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and James Rudolph, the Paul Down Assistant Professor of Industrial Design in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design, are also part of Notre Dame’s research team.
The standard of care for tracking fetal distress—monitoring uterine contractions and fetal heart rates—has remained fundamentally unchanged since the 1970s. While heart rate dips signal that a baby might be struggling, they do not tell clinicians why, nor do they directly measure actual oxygen deprivation (hypoxia). Confronted with incomplete data, medical teams frequently perform emergency Cesarean sections out of an abundance of caution. C-sections now account for nearly one-third of all U.S. births, contributing to the nation’s high maternal morbidity rates without necessarily reducing infant mortality.
The OMEGA system aims to replace this outdated technology with a comprehensive wearable platform that uses multiple noninvasive sensors to track health data from the mother, placenta, uterus, and fetus simultaneously.
The key light-based sensor that the Notre Dame team brings to OMEGA is designed to map tissue composition, and will be used to capture signals that reflect oxygen delivery and the baby’s response to contractions. The underlying technology is already powering a handheld scanner developed by O’Sullivan’s lab that is designed to optimize breast cancer treatment. Called frequency-domain near-infrared spectroscopy (FD-NIRS), the technique projects completely safe near-infrared light into the body to noninvasively capture composition and oxygenation from deep tissue.
Earlier this year, O’Sullivan’s team reported a breakthrough by demonstrating a fully wearable, wireless FD-NIRS system powered by a custom silicon chip that enables continuous, absolute quantification of tissue oxygenation without bulky racks of equipment or heavy cabling.
Now, O’Sullivan’s team is translating this technology into a format tailored specifically for mothers in the labor and delivery room.
“We are taking our proven optical sensing capabilities and redesigning them into a lightweight, flexible wearable device,” said O’Sullivan. “By placing advanced sensors in direct contact with the skin, we can eliminate bulky components, prioritize maternal comfort, and continuously track vital physiological shifts during childbirth.”
Integrated with OMEGA’s broader sensor array and predictive machine-learning models, this technology will allow doctors to determine whether a fetus is receiving adequate oxygen and, if not, diagnose the underlying cause.
The OMEGA team could receive up to $39.3 million, the scale of the ARPA-H funding reflects the immense complexity of maternal-fetal physiology, requiring an elite configuration of global experts to develop OMEGA and bring it to market.
“Tackling a health crisis of this magnitude requires a truly interdisciplinary approach,” O’Sullivan noted. “This project is a great example of ‘team science’—bringing together nine world-class institutions to bridge the gap between advanced microelectronics, deep clinical obstetrics, and data science to finally make childbirth safer for mothers and babies worldwide.”
As an affiliate of Notre Dame’s Eck Institute for Global Health, O’Sullivan’s work underscores the University’s larger commitment to maternal, newborn and child health.
The OMEGA project is co-led by Carnegie Mellon University and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Alongside the University of Notre Dame, the international consortium includes UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital, the University of Pittsburgh, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Pennsylvania, the Institute of Photonic Sciences (Spain), and the Tyndall National Institute (Ireland). The project is funded under ARPA-H’s Making Obstetrics Care Smart program.
The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Government.
—Notre Dame College of Engineering