Molly Guy and Chemuttaai Lang'at of Medtronic Labs in the U.S. will lead a team seeking to redefine how pregnant women manage hypertension and how clinicians remotely monitor patients' health. Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy have overtaken hemorrhage as a main cause of maternal mortality in some sub-Saharan African settings. Management requires careful monitoring, which is problematic in settings with limited access to care. The team will assess integration of locally-appropriate wearable sensors into their existing hypertension management model of care. The model combines automated blood pressure monitors, mobile devices, and a software application, together allowing for data collection, real-time feedback, SMS messaging, and efficient access to referrals and prescriptions. The team will conduct a six-month pilot of 150 pregnant hypertensive women in Kenya to evaluate usability, feasibility, and desirability of this wearable-enhanced holistic care ecosystem.

Takudzwa Sayi of the University of South Florida in the U.S. will use journey mapping to discover women's experiences and responses to hormonal contraceptives, as well as their interaction with providers, in Zimbabwe to help design new contraceptives. They will also hold focus group discussions with family planning providers to find out their views on the uptake of specific methods. They will enroll women and providers in rural and urban areas across Zimbabwe. The journey mapping will involve a series of six sessions and will document from the time a woman chooses a contraceptive through her experience of side effects and how she interacts with the providers. They will validate their approach by comparing it to results from standard survey methods.

Jesse Gitaka of Mount Kenya University in Kenya will lead the development and deployment of a point-of-care diagnostic for bacterial infections that have been implicated in poor pregnancy outcomes such as premature deliveries, still births, maternal and newborn sepsis and deaths. Their project will enable quick detection of these bacteria allowing for prompt treatment. They will test whether treating for these bacterial infections, which are usually not diagnosed, improves pregnancy outcomes in field situations. This strategy has the potential to inform pregnancy monitoring and follow up practice and policy.

Alison Drake of the University of Washington Foundation, Global WACh in the U.S. will conduct an automated SMS-based survey to gather the opinions of women and adolescents on family planning methods in Kenya in order to characterize contraceptive use, reasons for discontinuation, and experience with side effects over a 6-month period that can help develop more acceptable methods. Current surveys capture only a single impression, whereas experiences can change over time. Using a mobile platform requires minimal personnel, and participants can register their opinions remotely. Adolescents will also be included. They will recruit 1,000 women and adolescents at five family planning clinics in Kenya and send them automated SMS messages weekly for six months that ask them to choose from numbered options regarding, for example, if and what side effects they are experiencing from their current family planning method. A monetary incentive will be offered for each SMS response.