IVOR HORN: Hi.
I'm Dr. Ivor Horn, and I lead Google's health equity efforts.
You've just heard about some amazing innovations
in health care.
But even with all these advancements,
women around the globe still die during childbirth,
and in high numbers.
300,000 maternal deaths and 2.5 million perinatal deaths
occur each year, with an astounding 94%
happening in lower and middle income countries.
Uneven access to care can lead to unnecessary harm
to birthing parents and their babies.
Early ultrasound screening is a safe and effective method
to plan for pregnancy care and identify issues early.
The WHO recommends an ultrasound assessment
before 24 weeks of pregnancy.
This helps to assess the health of the birthing parent
and baby, plan the pregnancy journey,
and monitor for early risks and complications.
Ultrasound technology is becoming more portable and more
affordable, yet up to half of all birthing parents
in developing countries are not screened at all while pregnant.
Among the barriers to access is a shortage of expertise
in reading ultrasounds.
Our goal is to simplify barriers to acquiring and interpreting
ultrasounds.
How do we do that?
By supporting more people like midwives and community health
workers to provide care.
Imagine anyone, anywhere being able to perform accurate
ultrasounds with just a small handheld probe
and a smartphone.
Throughout the past year, we've been researching the use of AI
to assist with maternal health diagnostics.
We will soon publish foundational,
open access research that validates the use of AI
to help providers conduct ultrasounds
and perform assessments.
Our hope is that this work, and work to come,
will increase access to ultrasound
and improve experiences for birthing
parents and their babies.
That's why we're working closely with Northwestern Medicine
on further developing and testing these models
to be more generalizable across different levels of experience
and different technologies.
We launched this partnership with the goal
of cutting global maternal mortality rates in half.
We aim to accelerate research and development
in two key areas--
identifying high risk patients during pregnancy
more quickly and reliably, and building tools
to allow a broader range of professionals
to confidently provide access to these assessments
around the world.
Together, this research can potentially
drive automated and accurate AI evaluation of maternal
and fetal health risk.
It can also address barriers to scaling programs, enabling
timely care in the right settings.
To scale this technology and reach the many patients
and providers globally, partnerships will be critical.
We'll be working with health care organizations
and local champions to develop novel technologies
and get the technology into the right models of care
to reach patients.
We're thrilled to work with Northwestern
Medicine on these early stages of development.
Together, we're making continuous improvements
toward increasing access to care for everyone, everywhere.
Part of that is helping researchers
with their work on maternal health.
Dr. Lase Ajayi is the Director of Diversity Initiatives
and Clinical Researcher in Digital Medicine at Scripps
Research, and you'll hear from her next.
She's also an awardee of the Fitbit Health Equity Research
Initiative, a program aimed at supporting researchers working
to address health disparities.
She's the principal investigator of PowerMom,
a smartphone app-based research study that
enables pregnant parents to share
data about their pregnancies with scientists.
This story is an important example
of Google's efforts to make health care more equitable.
Dr. Ajayi is focusing on how PowerMom
can help underrepresented birthing parents, who
are more likely to die during and immediately
after childbirth, in the US compared
to their white counterparts.
I am so excited for you to hear more about her incredible work.
DR. LASE AJAYI: When I was pregnant
with my first daughter, I had terrible fibroids.
They caused a lot of pain.
As a Black woman, I actually avoid
going to the emergency room because of the things
that I face.
I try to avoid it.
In this particular instance, it was so bad
that I didn't have a choice.
I arrived by Uber by myself in excruciating pain.
Nobody came to help me or offer a wheelchair.
I was treated brusquely by the intake nurse.
When I was getting my ultrasound,
the technician was so rough and brutal, I was actually crying.
And it wasn't until the person who
was coming to check insurance realized
that I was a physician within the health care system
that the demeanor between the staff, the physician,
everybody, changed.
The problem facing Black and Hispanic people,
it falls into two really big categories.
It's the lack of access, and then
how we access the medical system in general.
Black women are more than three times
likely to die in childbirth or immediately after childbirth
than their white counterparts.
Black babies, again, more than two times more likely
to die than their white counterparts.
We're more likely to have gestational diabetes,
pre-eclampsia, and die from those complications.
But why is that?
It's about Black and Hispanic women
not feeling heard or seen by the medical system.
It's important to me because it's health care,
and it's something that we should all
be able to access, no matter what you look like.
PowerMom FIRST is a study from the PowerMom platform.
It stands for Fighting Inequity and Racism
using Supportive Technology.
We work with Fitbit to actually look
at structural and systemic racism
throughout the pregnancy journey.
Do you mind if I touch your belly?
SPEAKER 1: Absolutely.
DR. LASE AJAYI: The goal of the study
is that every person should have a healthy pregnancy
and a healthy baby.
The data that we'll be able to collect with Fitbit
is 24/7 heart rate, heart rate variability, oxygen saturation,
body weight, sleep, sleep stage, and activity.
SPEAKER 1: It looks like I've been averaging
about seven hours a night.
DR. LASE AJAYI: That's actually pretty good.
And then we'll look at outcomes of your pregnancy.
Were you someone who went to preterm labor?
Did you have high blood pressure,
hypertension, increased weight gain,
whatever during your pregnancy?
That allows us to collect this objective data
with the subjective information that they're providing to us.
And it correlates with the questions
that we ask them throughout the study.
We ask them about everyday discrimination.
We ask about vigilance.
We ask about how they're perceived
in their everyday lives.
So are you able to find time to exercise at all?
SPEAKER 1: You know, I've been doing better with that.
DR. LASE AJAYI: What I appreciate about Fitbit
and this initiative is it allows me
to give these devices to people who may not have access to it.
It allows people who don't traditionally participate
in research to give their voice, share their information
so that we can be more informed.
And by having a more diverse, informative database,
you're actually able to break down health disparities.
If you don't have representation in your cohorts,
you can't have a representative treatment.
PowerMom FIRST and PowerMom is about everyday people
working with researchers to find an answer, to find solutions.
We can't fight systemic racism without the people who
are experiencing it, without their input,
without their feedback, without their information.
And we, as doctors, as researchers,
want to work with this population.
We want to make it easier.
We want to hear you.
And we want to make it better.
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