Designing Safer Maternal-Risk Monitoring
From a leakage-controlled model to a verified local-and-hosted monitoring, alerting and recovery prototype.
Design and Evaluation of an AI-Enabled Remote Monitoring System for Maternal Health Risk Assessment in Resource-Constrained Healthcare Settings
A maternal-risk prediction is not the same as a care response. I designed and evaluated a research prototype that treats model inference as one component of an auditable monitoring and escalation workflow—including input checks, uncertainty handling, alert states and simulated connectivity failure.
What I set out to establish
Can we build a defensible model?
Audit the underlying data, limit feature-profile leakage, evaluate multiple model families, and choose a risk alert rule using training-only evidence.
Can we build a safer surrounding system?
Reject unusable measurements, abstain outside training support, persist assessment and alert states, and verify the hosted build matches the frozen research model.
The engineering question was not only “Can it predict?” but also “What does the system do when prediction, communication or follow-through becomes uncertain?”
The model sat inside a monitored workflow.
Two implementations shared one frozen decision logic: a reproducible Python reference and a hosted browser-to-TypeScript system.
Six measurement inputs
Age; systolic and diastolic blood pressure; blood sugar; body temperature; heart rate. The UI accepts Celsius and converts it at the model inference boundary.
What the server records
Assessment, rejection/abstention status, model output when supported, alert state, queue/retry information and an auditable trail of events.
The hosted interface calls POST /api/predict and uses POST /api/recover for queued alert recovery. The hosted TypeScript implementation executes a pinned JSON representation of the frozen 400-tree forest; it does not depend on Python running on the researcher’s laptop.
Source: MSc dissertation, Sections 3.12–3.15. Platform-assisted portions of the browser/TypeScript build are credited on the final page.
A safe failure matters as much as a successful prediction.
The prototype separates input validity, applicability of the trained model, inference, and alert delivery.
Delivery is modelled as an explicit state transition
When higher-risk results or safety-abstention conditions require attention, the system records an event and attempts, queues or retries an alert. That is testable software behaviour—not evidence that a health professional saw or acted on an alert.
Make the modelling pipeline defensible before reporting accuracy.
The downloaded file was audited before the data were split, and identical six-feature profiles were kept out of both partitions simultaneously.
Data quality and leakage
Grouped splitting protected against identical measurement profiles appearing in both development and held-out partitions. Thirty-five conflicting-label profiles were retained as ambiguity, not silently “corrected.”
Model families compared
Dummy baseline; logistic regression; decision tree; Random Forest; support vector machine; histogram gradient boosting. Candidate selection used training-only grouped validation.
An explicit operational trade-off
Applying the safety-oriented threshold increased high-risk sensitivity from 77.3% to 86.4% but lowered overall accuracy from 71.1% to 68.9%—a deliberately documented trade-off, not evidence that the threshold is appropriate for real clinical use.
The numbers are informative—and imperfect.
Held-out performance was assessed after the model-selection rule and high-risk threshold were chosen using development data only.
The safety rule generated more alerts to capture additional high-risk records. This made mid-risk performance especially weak (6 of 21 correctly classified) and increased false alerts from other classes. The trade-off underscores why prospective, clinician-led evaluation is necessary.
Source: dissertation Figures 4.3–4.4 and Tables 4.8–4.9. Percentages are rounded from the recorded metrics.
A research interface made the model behaviour inspectable.
The dissertation includes an illustrative Celsius-input screen showing synthetic measurements, a high-risk output and a caregiver alert state.
- Open the prototype and use only the prefilled values or invented measurements within the displayed ranges.
- Run an assessment and inspect the risk class, probabilities or abstention outcome, and simulated alert record.
- Try different simulated connectivity profiles, including complete outage and alert recovery.
Research demonstration only. Do not use for clinical decisions and do not enter actual patient data or personal health information. Input measurements and assessment outputs are stored in the prototype’s research audit database. A simulated caregiver alert is not a real clinical notification.
Implementation and verification evidence
The frozen Python joblib reference and hosted JSON-forest representation produced identical classes for all 90 held-out records, with maximum class-probability difference 3.33 × 10⁻¹⁶ against a specified 10⁻¹² tolerance. Checks covered unit conversion, invalid values, outside-support abstention, alert creation and outage recovery.
Seven seeded communication profiles covered normal and degraded connectivity, complete outage, and subsequent recovery. These were controlled simulations, not tests of hospital workflows, a real SMS carrier or field connectivity.
The implementation used the Lovable development environment to assist with portions of the browser/TypeScript application and deployment, as disclosed in the dissertation. Research specification, design decisions and evaluation evidence were led by the author.
Technical proof is necessary. Clinical readiness is a different bar.
The work demonstrates a testable systems-engineering approach, not a deployable maternal-risk diagnosis product.
What the prototype establishes
Traceable requirements; reproducible data preparation; grouped evaluation; an explicit safety-oriented threshold; invalid-input and abstention states; two matching execution profiles; and reproducible software and network simulations.
What remains unproven
Prospective Nigerian patient performance, clinical safety and effectiveness, regulatory approval, security certification, wearable integration, live hospital connections, or confirmed clinician response to alerts.
What I would require before real-world use
Appropriate research and data permissions; prospective Nigerian validation under clinician oversight; review of calibration, decision thresholds and potential subgroup disparities; secure operations, human escalation responsibilities, external interoperability testing and applicable regulatory assessment.
How this connects to BRIMMHQ
BRIMMHQ is a separate human-led maternal-support venture working on continuity between formal healthcare visits. It does not deploy this research classifier in clinical care. My transferable learning is about structured follow-up, reliable escalation, auditability and knowing when technology should hand responsibility back to people.
Research provenance and attribution
- Research: Olokede, Winner Abiola (2026). Design and Evaluation of an AI-Enabled Remote Monitoring System for Maternal Health Risk Assessment in Resource-Constrained Healthcare Settings. MSc Systems Engineering research project, University of Lagos.
- Dataset: Ahmed, M. (2020). Maternal Health Risk [dataset]. UCI Machine Learning Repository. https://doi.org/10.24432/C5DP5D. CC BY 4.0. Source rows were audited, deduplicated and grouped; the charts and summary figures are research-derived analyses.
- Guidance: Professor O. S. Asaolu (academic supervision); Dr John Ogbemhe (technical redevelopment guidance). Acknowledgement does not imply endorsement of this independent portfolio presentation.
- Visuals: Architecture, flow and charts redrawn from the dissertation’s documented methods/results. Figure 7 reproduces an illustrative prototype interface from the submitted dissertation; values are synthetic.
- Build assistance: Lovable assisted with portions of hosted browser/TypeScript implementation and deployment; research specifications, model/evaluation decisions and verification claims remain attributable to the author.
This is a professional research case study, not the full dissertation. No participant records, stakeholder quotations or identifiable patient information are reproduced. Any public release remains subject to applicable university publication and IP requirements.