Wavelet Medical Receives ARPA-H Award to Support Validation of Novel Fetal Brain Monitoring Technology
NEW YORK, June 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Wavelet Medical announced today an award from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to support validation of its novel fetal brain monitoring technology. The award of up to $2.14M over 12 months commences in June. ARPA-H, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, was established in 2022 to advance high-potential, high-impact biomedical and health research that cannot be readily accomplished through traditional research or commercial activity. The agency’s awardees are developing entirely new ways to tackle the hardest challenges in health in years, not decades. Wavelet Medical, founded by Liz Golden (CEO), Dr. Emily Lee (Chief Medical Officer), and Dr. Jose Cortes-Briones (Head of Science), is developing the first non-invasive, AI-powered fetal electroencephalography (EEG) monitoring platform to detect fetal brain distress in real time and prevent avoidable brain injury at birth.
For decades, obstetrics has relied primarily on fetal heart rate monitoring (FHM), a tool that does not directly measure neurological function and is indeterminate in up to 85% of births. The result: missed cases of hypoxia leading to lifelong disability, and unnecessary C-sections driven by false positives. Each year in the U.S., more than 35,000 infants suffer brain injuries at birth and approximately one-third of births are delivered via caesarian section. Wavelet changes the paradigm by measuring the organ that first shows signs of fetal distress: the brain. Using non-invasive EEG captured through the mother’s abdomen and reconstructed with proprietary AI algorithms, Wavelet identifies auditory-evoked brain responses that signal neurological distress – without invasive scalp electrodes or added risk to mother or baby.
