Oxford Labour Monitoring

OUR MISSiON

Oxford Labour Monitoring is committed to preventing injury of babies during labour and delivery, caused by lack of oxygen in utero - rare but devastating events. Our work will potentially benefit families, clinicians and healthcare systems by reducing brain injuries, the deaths of babies during labour or after birth and unnecessary medical interventions in childbirth.

OUR APPROACH

Our multidisciplinary research is focused on determining the relationship between fetal heart rate and fetal health around the onset of and during labour, by analysing 'big' routinely collected datasets of maternity data. The goal is to provide much needed, data-driven software at the bedside to support clinical decisions when women are in labour.

OUR HISTORY

The Oxford Labour Monitoring group was established in 2022, building on its predecessor - Oxford Fetal Monitoring Technologies which began in early 2012 as a natural umbrella for the relevant work in the Nuffield Department of Women's & Reproductive Health spanning over 30 years.

Latest News

Read our latest research Advancements in Fetal Heart Rate Monitoring: A report on opportunities and strategic initiatives for better intrapartum care in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

Team member and research midwife Veronica Blanco Gutierrez won best poster award at last November's British Intrapartum Care Conference. Entitled Bridging The Human-machine Gap, the research was a public involvement co-production with women from the global majority, focusing on their experiences of CTG monitoring, the good and the bad, and identifying areas for future research. For more information click here.

Also last year, Prof Georgieva participated at Tech4Eva 2024. For more details about the conference and a video recording, see here.

The Oxford Labour Monitoring team is mourning the sad loss of Professor Redman who passed away on the 13th August 2024 at the age of 82. He was a true pioneer, a great scientist, a visionary and a very patient man with a superb sense of humour.

A tribute page by Women's and Reproductive Health Department at Oxford can be found here.

You can also click here to sign the online book of condolences.

Meet our team

The research relating to monitoring during labour is led by Professor Antoniya Georgieva . Our specialist team develops data-driven cardiotocography (CTG) systems/software to continuously assess fetal wellbeing at the onset of and during term labour. We are based at the John Radcliffe Hospital and at the Big Data Institute and collaborates with the Institute of Biomedical Engineering. The research is partially funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).

	Antoniya Georgieva Associate Professor, Group Lead
	Mariana Tome Clinical Research Fellow
	Nicky Lyon Expert Advisor and Patient Public Voice, co-founder of the Campaign for Safer Births
	Lawrence Impey Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

See all team profiles

PUBLIC involvement

Oxford Labour Monitoring is committed to engaging the public in our work, by communicating what we do clearly and by putting women and families at the centre of our research. We call this Parent, Patient and Public Involvement (PPPI). Our PPPI strategy is led by Rachel Plachchinski and Charlotte Bevan with the support of Nicky Lyon, founder of the Campaign for Safer Births and our PPPI panel.

You can see all the members of our PPPI panel here.

Charlotte Bevan

Parent, Patient and Public Involvement (PPPI) Co-Lead

Rachel Plachcinski

Parent, Patient and Public Involvement (PPPI) Co-Lead

Networking (SPaM Workshops)

The Signal Processing and Monitoring (SPaM) in Labour workshop is a bi-annual event, held since 2015. It is an exciting initiative to bring together experts in labour monitoring and fetal heart rate analysis to critically review and discuss current issues such as: new technology; comprehensive digital databases; statistical analysis; classification; clinical practice, fetal physiology and challenges. Our team regularly attends and presents at these meetings.

The presentations from the last workshop in July 2024 in Cagliari, Italy, are available here.

See all SPAM workshops

SPOTLIGHT: HOw we LISTEN TO A BABY'S HEARTBEAT

A CTG also known as a Cardiotocograph is a machine that monitors the baby's heartbeat and the uterine contractions during pregnancy and labour. We can listen to the fetal heart rate through a stethoscope, a Doppler hand-held device or a continuous electronic monitor. Electronic monitoring produces a paper strip, showing graphs of the fetal heart rate and of uterine contractions, which change with time.

More about CTGs