Carnegie Mellon Team Awarded ARPA-H Contract to Transform Care During Labor and Childbirth | National

PITTSBURGH–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Jun 24, 2026–

Carnegie Mellon University is leading a multi-university team that has secured an award of up to $39.3 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to develop a wearable monitoring system to better identify fetal distress and its cause, enabling a safer labor and delivery experience for mothers and babies. The system, called OMEGA, or Optical, Mechanical, and Electrical Global Assessment of fetal hypoxia, aims to replace 50-year old, indirect, unreliable fetal heart rate monitoring technology with a unified, real-time assessment of fetal oxygen delivery and adaptive capacity. The project is under ARPA-H’s Making Obstetric Care Smart program, which is led by ARPA-H Program Manager Kate Arnold, M.D., MBA.

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