New invention hoped to save more than 70,000 lives a year

Researchers from Guy’s and St Thomas’ and King’s College London have developed a new tool to help medical professionals around the world save the lives of women during childbirth.  The Microlife Vital Signs Alert (VSA) has been developed with a $1 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and is specifically designed for use in the developing world where it is hoped it could help reduce maternal deaths by up to 25%, saving more than 70,000 lives a year.

The VSA is a simple to use handheld device which costs only £12 and runs on a mobile-phone charger.  By accurately monitoring the mother’s blood pressure and pulse rate it is able to categorise the likelihood of the woman going into shock.  It displays these results in a traffic light system that clearly indicates the risk of shock or high blood pressure – green if a woman is not at risk, amber if she needs to be carefully monitored, or red if she requires emergency treatment.  The device needs little training to use which makes it invaluable in areas where medical expertise is limited.

It was initially trialled in Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Zambia and in February around 2,500 were shipped out to clinics in Pakistan, Mozambique, India and Nigeria.  Now the US health charity Jhpiego has ordered 5,000 devices for its projects in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.

Professor Suellen Miller, Director of the Safe Motherhood Programmes at the University of California says: “Delay in recognition of sick mothers is a leading cause of maternal death, with almost all deaths occurring in under-resourced areas of the world. This device is perfectly suited to those settings and has immense potential to impact on this major barrier to improving maternal health globally.”

Andrew Weeks, consultant obstetrician at Liverpool Women’s Hospital said “The difficulty is trying to work out who are the sick mothers. The identification of those critically ill ones is one of the holy grails of medicine. The beauty of it is that it interprets it for you and categorises into red, amber or green.”

Read more about it here and here