6/23/2026
PITTSBURGH — Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Magee-Womens Research Institute (MWRI) and UPMC are part of a multi-institution team awarded up to $39.3 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, to develop a wearable monitoring system that could give labor and delivery teams a clearer, more complete picture of fetal health in real time.
In the United States, cesarean deliveries account for roughly one-third of births, and many are performed out of concern for possible fetal distress. Fetal monitoring has remained largely unchanged for decades, and clinicians rely heavily on contraction and fetal heart rates to watch for signs that a baby may be in distress. However, a concerning fetal heart rate pattern does not always tell clinicians whether the fetus is truly hypoxic, where the problem is coming from, or which intervention is needed.
The new system, called OMEGA, short for Optical, Mechanical and Electrical Global Assessment of fetal hypoxia, is being developed as part of ARPA-H’s Making Obstetrics Care Smart program and aims to develop technology that can help clinicians distinguish true distress from false alarms and respond with appropriate interventions.
The project is led by Carnegie Mellon University and includes partners from nine institutions. University of Pittsburgh faculty will oversee patient and provider engagement and offer maternal-fetal medicine expertise. UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital will be one of the project’s largest clinical testing environments, supported by the robust research facility and infrastructure of MWRI.
Ideally, OMEGA will move beyond fetal heart rate alone and develop a noninvasive system that can assess oxygen delivery across the maternal-fetal system, including signals from the patient, placenta, uterus, and fetus. The technology will be built to monitor blood pressure, oxygenation, heart rate, vascular function, contractions, blood flow, and brain function.
“There’s a tremendous appetite for improvement in this space,” said Hyagriv Simhan, M.D., M.S., professor and executive vice chair of obstetrical services in the Pitt Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences and director of Clinical Innovation for Women’s Health at UPMC. Dr. Simhan is leading UPMC Magee clinical site testing of the tool with Jacob Larkin, M.D., associate professor in the Pitt Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences and medical director of obstetrical services at UPMC Magee.
“This project is exciting and unique because we are integrating the end users – patients, clinicians, health systems – into the design process from the beginning,” said Dr. Simhan.
By testing and iterating the device in a high-volume labor and delivery unit, buttressed by the research capacity of an institution like MWRI, researchers at Pitt and UPMC will help determine how these new physiologic signals should be translated into information that clinicians can act on during labor.
“If we are developing a monitoring device for someone to wear during labor, we have to consider their needs and experience at every step of the process,” said Tamar Krishnamurti, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine; clinical and translational science; and obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at Pitt. “Better monitoring is not just about adding more data. It is about building a tool that is acceptable and actionable to both patients and providers and deployable at scale.”
Krishnamurti’s team will lead interviews, focus groups and stakeholder engagement with patients, clinicians, health system administrators, and ethics and regulatory experts to help shape the device around real delivery-room needs.
“Labor is a dynamic environment, and the technology has to work with that reality,” said Jana Kainerstorfer, Ph.D., professor of biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and principal investigator of OMEGA. “Our goal is to bring together multiple types of sensing in a system that can give clinicians more complete information without adding burden for patients or care teams.” 
The four-year project will develop and test the monitoring system while collecting data that can be used to train and evaluate artificial intelligence and machine-learning models. The models are intended to help detect true risk of fetal hypoxia, identify likely causes and support more targeted clinical decisions.
The OMEGA project team is co-directed by Tiffany Ko, Ph.D., at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and includes partners at the University of Notre Dame, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Pennsylvania, the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, Spain and Tyndall National Institute in Cork, Ireland.
Photos (click image for high-resolution version)
First Photo
Caption: OMEGA will be built to monitor blood pressure, oxygenation, heart rate, vascular function, contractions, blood flow, and brain function.
Credit: Carnegie Mellon University
Second Photo
Caption: Hyagriv Simhan, M.D., M.S.
Credit: Magee-Womens Research Institute
Third Photo
Caption: Jacob Larkin, M.D.
Credit:
Fourth Photo
Caption: Tamar Krishnamurti, Ph.D.
Credit: University of Pittsburgh
Fifth Photo
Caption: Jana Kainerstorfer, Ph.D.
Credit: Carnegie Mellon University
