Georgia Tech: Labor Tracker

Obese women (BMI >= 30 kg/m^2) are at elevated risk for cesarean delivery, with rates up to 5 times higher than normal weight women. Cesarean deliveries are most often indicated for obese women because of abnormally slow labor progression, a complication known as labor dystocia. In clinical practice, expectations of labor progress are not individualized by degree of maternal obesity, but instead are standardized based on the average rate of cervical dilation among healthy-weight women (about 1cm/hour). As a result, obese women are at increased risk of cesarean delivery simply because they do not proceed through labor as expected by the nurses and doctors who provide their intrapartum care.

This project involves the development of a tool, the Labor Tracker, that would allow clinicians caring for obese women during labor to view a woman’s cervical dilation progress on a graph that represents normal and abnormally slow labor progression according to that woman’s BMI. Although information about cervical dilation among women with different degrees of obesity is available from large, multi-site studies, this data is not typical ly used by clinicians to guide their care of obese women. The Labor Tracker would, for the first time, provide easy access to BMI-individualized labor progression tracking for clinicians at the bedside.