December 30, 2002

The CardGuard home fetal monitor will assist in easing the stress brought on by high-risk pregancies.Thanks to a new Israeli innovation, high-risk pregnant women can monitor the heartbeat and pulse of their fetus at home and can transmit the results over the telephone to their hospital.

As a result of this technological breakthrough, women don’t have to leave their house again and again to get to the hospital, saving a great deal of time and allowing the expectant mothers to maintain their routine.

Developed and tested at the high-risk unit at the Rabin Medical Center together with the Israeli company CardGuard, the home monitoring device is now in clinical trials at hospitals in California, Holland, Sweden, Hungary, Germany, Italy and Spain.

According to Professor Moshe Hod, manager of the unit for high-risk pregnancies at the Rabin Medical Center, “Measuring the rate of the heartbeat of the fetus over the course of the pregnancy is the central information for assessing the health of the fetus. The monitor is a central and crucial element for all pregnancies, but particularly for high-risk pregnancies.”

Each day, women attach themselves to their home monitor and sent to their doctor in the department a record of their baby’s heartbeat and their contractions. The doctor immediately checks the information that they receive and confirms by telephone the receipt of the information and its accuracy. Only in a situation in which the doctor observes a change in the heart rate of the fetus or the rate of contractions, will he ask the woman to leave her home and go to the hospital.

The new monitor has additional functions such as monitoring blood pressure, body temperature, blood sugar level and breathing rat, all of which the women can do in their own home and send over the phone lines to the department of high risk pregnancies.

Professor Dov Feldberg, director of the OBGYN unit at the Rabin Medical Center said the home monitor is especially useful for pregnant women with chronic diseases such as diabetes.

“We do daily monitoring from the seventh month of woman with chronic diseases. Using the monitor is simple and easy, the women learn in the high-risk unit how to use the home monitor and carry out the checks and they feel confident that with the device in their own hands at home, it is always accessible if they feel worried. At any moment if a woman feels discomfort or as if something could be wrong, she has it within her own power to attach herself to the monitor and check out the problem.”

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