Fetal and neonate health in vaginal labour: translation from research to industry and clinical practice

PI: Jerusalem, Antoine

Department: Engineering Science (DF)

The field of Birth Mechanics is in its infancy but growing fast. By the very nature of the research associated to delivery and maternal/fetal risks, current models focus mainly on mechanical predictions. While this allows for very quantitative information, these currently do not feed into clinical practice or biomedical devices which still heavily rely on empirical and pragmatic approaches. More importantly, while acknowledging that ""more"" is needed to account for patient-specific large variability in fetal and maternal morphologies in the design of clinical devices, our clinical and industrial partners all concur that the current research efforts in women's health engineering and birth mechanics - while growing - are not sufficient to impact the clinics and market at a sufficient pace. To this end, this EPSRC IAA grant will create a series of workshops, dissemination event and travel to our industrial partner for our early career researcher to translate research model outputs and future roadmaps into actionable information for clinicians and industrial partner. This will allow us to have a direct impact by consolidating the awareness of clinicians and scientists in leading hospitals to the topic of Birth Mechanics and liaising directly with industrial end-users for novel dedicated designs building directly on our research results.