big bets & bad call with Kali Healthcare

<p>The CTG machine sitting in every maternity ward? It was developed in the 1970s. Fifty years old and essentially unchanged — until Emerson Keenan and Fiona Brownfoot decided to build something better.</p><p>Kali Healthcare has developed a wearable fetal monitoring sensor that sits on the abdomen and picks up the fetal heart rate regardless of where the baby is or whether the mum can make it to hospital. No ultrasound probe to position. No signal dropout when the baby moves. And critically — it can be used at home.</p><p>In this episode, Emerson (CEO/CTO and electrical engineer) and Fiona (practicing obstetrician, academic at the University of Melbourne, and mother of two) join Clint and Andrew to walk through the full journey: from a PhD cold call and a serendipitous introduction, to GE Healthcare EMR integration, a pivotal clinical trial, and an out-of-the-blue email from the Australian Flying Doctor Service.</p><p>They cover the stillbirth rate (1 in 170 pregnancies — more common than the road toll), the moment the AI model finally cracked fetal heart rate detection at 7pm on a random Tuesday, co-designing the device with midwives (it&#39;s now shaped like a makeup compact), and what $1.7M in investment versus $10–15M USD in the US actually looks like on the ground.</p><p>Big bets, bad calls, and a device that could change how the world monitors pregnancy.</p>