Half a million women die each year giving birth. The two pregnancy-related blood pressure complications, preeclampsia and gestational hypertension, are the cause of 76,000 mothers & ½ million infants dying each year. Infants who survive often experience long-term health problems, including cerebral palsy, chronic lung disease, blindness & hearing loss, and the resulting societal healthcare costs are high.

Existing work has proposed a range of screening procedures and algorithms for detecting those pregnancies that will later develop preeclampsia or gestational hypertension. However, these are resources intensive for the service providers to implement, and challenged with a high false positive rate of up to 10%.

With the WODIA project we aim to make it safer for women to give birth by identifying and tracking the early signs of preeclampsia and gestational hypertension while the complications are still preventable, by developing a personalised medicine screening, therapy, and home monitoring service.

WODIA will combine the maternal characteristics with a range of biomarkers. Together, these will allow for more effective targeted personalised medicine with individual medication dosing and fewer and more effective clinical visits.