OMEGA project improves clinical assessment of fetal health

A consortium including Carnegie Mellon University and Spain's ICFO research lab is developing a wearable monitoring system to better identify fetal distress and its cause, enabling a safer labor and delivery experience for mothers and babies. 

The $39 million OMEGA project, named for Optical Mechanical and Electrical Global Assessment of fetal hypoxia and supported by the US Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), commenced in June 2026.

It aims to replace existing indirect, unreliable fetal heart rate monitoring technology with a unified real-time assessment of fetal oxygen delivery and adaptive capacity.

The standard of care for determining whether a baby is in distress during labor and delivery remains largely unchanged from the 1970s, commented the project. Changes in heart rate can indicate potential problems, but they fail to provide critical information about whether a fetus is receiving enough oxygen. Without direct information about oxygen levels, clinical decisions made during labor often rely on incomplete data. 

"When a fetus is suspected to be hypoxic, care teams may have to act quickly without knowing the underlying cause," said Carnegie Mellon's Jana Kainerstorfer, Principal Investigator of OMEGA. "The ability to directly measure a lack of oxygen to the fetus, and identify the cause, will have significant implications for obstetric care by enabling safer deliveries for all."

The goal for OMEGA is a wearable multimodal platform for real-time fetal oxygen assessment using novel sensors and AI integration, based around optical and electrophysiological sensors such as electroencephalography and near-IR spectroscopy.

A device suiting the complexity of maternal–fetal physiology

ICFO's previous work on optical monitoring of infant health includes the TinyBrains project, in which functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) were integrated to assess infant neurovascular problems and abnormal blood supply.

Turgut Durduran, project coordinator of ICFO's work in TinyBrains and leader of the center's Medical Optics team, will develop a wearable OEM module to be integrated into OMEGA's optical system.

"It is exciting to look back at where we were in the early 2000s and compare that to where our technologies are now," Durduran commented. "We can now propose scalable, wearable technologies while the accepted clinical tools have essentially remained the same. OMEGA project will allow us to work with the frontier researchers in Europe and in the USA, developing different modalities and incorporating them in a unique system."

To pinpoint why fetal hypoxia occurs during labor, OMEGA is looking at the whole system, not just the fetus in isolation. It will integrate several noninvasive sensors to measure contributing factors not only from the mother, but also from the placenta and uterus, as well as the fetus. This systems-level, mechanism-based solution aligns with the complexity of maternal–fetal physiology, commented the project, enabling clinicians to understand not only whether a fetus is distressed but why.

"The possibilities for clinical impact with such developments are very broad and we are still discovering them," said Turgut Durduran.