As high-risk pregnancies become more common due to advanced maternal age, among other factors, healthcare providers are looking beyond hospitals to improve maternal and foetal monitoring. Medtech start-up Connected Health Development (CHD) is developing a wearable monitoring solution that enables clinicians to track foetal health remotely. We spoke with Laurent Vandebrouck, CEO, and Professor Nicolas Sananès, Chief Medical Officer, about how connected at-home monitoring makes pregnancy more comfortable, continuous and patient-centric – and whether this model can be rolled out across the healthcare space.

Pregnancy care is undergoing a major shift. Rising maternal age and the growing use of assisted reproductive technologies have increased the number of high-risk pregnancies worldwide, while expectant mothers are also demanding higher standards of safety and care. ‘And rightly so,’ Nicolas affirmed. ‘It’s natural that women experiencing high-risk pregnancies would be demanding about their care.’

Still, the scale of the challenge is significant. Of the roughly 140 million births worldwide each year – including around 77,000 in Switzerland – an estimated 15–25% involve conditions that warrant closer observation. In cases of suspected foetal compromise – particularly intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR), where the foetus is smaller than expected because the placenta is not functioning adequately – clinicians need continuous insight into foetal well-being to determine whether early delivery is necessary. A variety of other maternal conditions, including diabetes, hypertension and metabolic disorders, can also increase risk of preterm birth and require individualised monitoring strategies.

The value of at-home pregnancy monitoring

Against this backdrop, we’re seeing a wave of new technologies that enable earlier detection, closer surveillance and safer outcomes for both mother and baby. Notably, many of them are shifting pregnancy monitoring beyond the hospital and into the home, with the goal of making care more continuous and less disruptive.

After all, traditional foetal monitoring systems typically provide only ‘snapshot’ measurements in clinical settings: pregnant women are required to attend a hospital appointment, where they must remain seated or lying down for 20–30 minutes while a healthcare professional collects data manually using a sensor and gel. By contrast, next-generation monitoring devices – like the MONI2 belt developed by CHD, which is embedded with multiple high-quality sensors and linked to a smartphone app – are designed to be comfortable enough for prolonged use during everyday life without intervention from healthcare professionals. This significantly increases patient adherence to protocols.

‘Usability is key for us,’ Laurent contended. ‘We want to remove typical barriers to care by creating a product that functions more like ordinary clothing: it’s washable, easy to use and compatible with normal daily activities. The result is monitoring that is less medicalised and less restrictive but potentially more reflective of real-world maternal and foetal conditions.’

Moreover, technological advances now allow remote solutions like CHD’s to track foetal heart rate, electrocardiogram data and contraction activity simultaneously, providing more precise insights into foetal well-being and enabling more accurate predictive analysis.

The challenge of unsupervised monitoring

Remote monitoring is considered key to improving maternal well-being and autonomy. ‘In an ideal world,’ Nicolas said, ‘women should be able to experience pregnancy safely and serenely in the comfort of their own homes whenever possible.’ Nonetheless, while remote patient monitoring offers significant benefits, continuous access to physiological data and automated alerts may also inadvertently heighten stress and anxiety, particularly during a high-risk pregnancy.

To answer this challenge, CHD’s approach is intentionally designed to strike a careful balance between reassurance and clinical oversight. Rather than exposing patients to an exhaustive stream of medical data, the solution prioritises clear, patient-centric insights that support understanding without creating unnecessary apprehension. At the same time, healthcare professionals retain access to the full range of clinical data, enabling informed decision-making.

Nicolas explained to us: ‘In the model we propose, healthcare providers always retain oversight of detailed clinical data and determine how monitoring should be performed – whether for an hour a day, overnight or during specific activities. Meanwhile, patients are given access to simplified information intended to reassure rather than alarm. The broader goal is to empower women with greater visibility into their pregnancies while ensuring that medical decision-making remains firmly guided by clinicians.’

Moving towards at-home monitoring across healthcare

This pattern in pregnancy monitoring tallies with a wider transformation in healthcare delivery: the gradual shift from hospital-centric care to at-home monitoring. Laurent expressed his conviction that ‘the at-home care model is the future of healthcare’.

The rationale is both human and systemic. On the one hand, patients generally prefer to remain in familiar surroundings with their families rather than repeatedly travelling to hospitals or enduring long in-patient stays. At the same time, healthcare systems across Europe and elsewhere in the world are facing mounting pressure from rising workloads, staffing shortages, shrinking hospital capacity and constrained budgets.

Together, these forces are accelerating interest in technologies that allow clinicians to monitor patients safely and effectively from a distance. ‘Advances in wireless connectivity, cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) now make it possible to collect and transmit high-quality patient data in real time, enabling clinicians to remotely oversee pregnancies and other conditions in a way that wasn’t technically feasible even a decade or two ago,’ Laurent said. For healthcare providers, this reduces unnecessary hospital visits and frees up resources for more critical cases; for patients, it offers greater comfort, autonomy and quality of life, without sacrificing medical oversight.

A rare win-win situation, right? Unfortunately, challenges remain – and they are less technological than structural. Many healthcare systems still reimburse care primarily through in-person visits and hospital stays. As remote monitoring becomes more widespread, payers and providers, in Laurent’s view, will need to adopt more flexible, subscription-based reimbursement models to support the growing shift from hospital-based to home-based care. ‘If successfully implemented,’ he said, ‘this shift could be transformative: improving patient experience and outcomes while also easing pressure on overstretched healthcare systems. We just need some time to get there.’