Can we predict miscarriage with an activity tracker? Conversation with Professor Benjamin Smarr, Part II

When it comes to categorizing pregnant women as high or low risk, we leave so much information on the table--which keeps us limited to the model where doctors use broad averages to triage care for pregnant women. Age is a definitive way to categorize pregnant women. On average a woman who is 35 or older is considered of advanced maternal age and may be watched more carefully throughout the pregnancy. But the number 35 is no magic line crossed;

If you have encountered gestational hypertension or preterm birth in a previous pregnancy, you are “at risk” to experience it again, but that view of a second pregnancy is a rough cut of the information we could be using.

If you knew more about your body’s response to pregnancy, could you turn that risk down? Some aspects of personalized medicine have reached other areas of health care, and it now seems to be reaching pregnancy.

In today’s episode I finish my conversation with Professor Benjamin Smarr, about his studies of pregnant women using data collected through an activity tracker. He shares some of his surprising results about miscarriage and age in pregnancy.

Find more of Professor Smarr's work here: https://smarr.ucsd.edu/