Blog

  • The article below has also been reported on here in the news.

  • Following up on the news around the impact of chronic stress on iron levels in the fetus, here we report what can be done to detect and monitor chronic stress levels during every pregnancy: https://rdcu.be/cRFh5

  • Pleased to announce the public release of a comprehensive heart rate variability (HRV) estimation pipeline in Python that outputs 124 HRV features. This is a peer-reviewed publication in MethodsX. I hope this will facilitate a more broad and reproducible adoption of the plethora of elegant mathematical algorithms for estimation of time series properties that are available to date, many of which however rarely used at scale. This codebase unifies several important steps of HRV computation under one roof. It also generalizes to problems of estimation of variability in any time series, especially physiological ones, such as those from wearables and contact-free biosensors. I provide a proof of concept on 31 subjects wearing an Apple Watch overnight (somnography) for estimating the sleep state architecture. The algorithmic steps covered are

• Univariate or multivariate time series input; ingestion, preprocessing, and computation of 124 HRV metrics

• Estimation of intra- and inter-individual higher-order temporal fluctuations of HRV metrics

• Application to a sleep dataset recorded using Apple Watch and expert sleep labeling

  • Pregnancy health and pregnancy stress receive attention on KUOW (Seattle's NPR station). I am grateful to have been interviewed by Eilis O'Neill about our recent publication in Scientific Reports on the use of pregnancy health monitoring to detect the effects of chronic stress on fetal health. Specifically, we found that chronic stress in the third trimester reduces baby's iron as measured at birth. Iron is essential for the human body, especially for brain function. We discuss approaches to mitigate or prevent these effects.

  • Disturbances of iron homeostasis (regulation) are very common in pregnancy (~50% of all pregnancies present with iron deficiencies) and iron is vital for fetal brain development. Prenatal stress, i.e., chronic stress a pregnant mother experiences, also has a lasting impact on fetal and postnatal development, well into adult life. Based on insights from preclinical studies in my lab on fetal brain development and neuroinflammation, we asked if prenatal stress interferes with iron homeostasis compounding the impact on the fetal neurodevelopmental trajectory. [Full text PDF: https://rdcu.be/cOW0v] Using causal inference and machine learning techniques, we report in a prospective cohort of pregnant women that prenatal stress alters fetal iron homeostasis in a sex-specific manner; we provide a biophysical (ECG-based) biomarker to detect this impact noninvasively and early in the third trimester.

  • Most of us probably wear or otherwise use some kind of biosensor every day, on body or ambient. In this paper, I review and synthesize the scientific evidence on the potential of wearables and ambient biosensors to help track acute and chronic inflammation.

  • In this paper, I review and synthesize the scientific evidence on the potential of wearables and ambient biosensors to help track acute and chronic inflammation:

  • "Improving pregnancy outcomes in humans through studies in sheep": In this comprehensive review of the animal model of human pregnancy a team from around the globe pulled together data showing how this model has contributed to better understanding of fetal physiology and perinatal health care over the past 60 years.

  • Fetal infection goes mostly undiagnosed and alters brain development increasing risk for or directly leading to perinatal brain injury

  • A recent commentary on the status of fetal monitoring during labor.

  • On the future of perinatal heart rate variability (HRV) monitoring in predicting developing brain injury: what is HRV telling us and can it help to treat the right babies at the right time?