Fetal Heart Monitor Development
Hess began working on a fetal heart monitor in the 1930s as a research fellow at Yale University due to his frustration with the limitations of using a stethoscope on a subject with two heartbeats and undergoing contractions.
In 1949, after World War II, Hess returned to Yale and resumed his work, along with postdoctoral fellow Dr. Edward Hon. In 1957, using a six-and-a-half-foot-tall machine, they became the first in the world to continuously monitor electrical cardiac signals from a fetus.
Through the 1960s, working with Wasil Kitvenko, the chief of the medical school’s electronics laboratory, Dr. Hess continued to improve on the equipment, introducing telemetry and reducing the monitor’s size. The device, which allowed monitoring to continue during labor, became one of the most-used tests in obstetrics.
The original machine still resides today in the basement of a building just outside the city of Hartford called the "Hartford Medical Society."
Read more about this topic: Orvan Hess
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