Incubator bodysuit for premature infants
According to a WHO report, an estimated 15 million babies are born preterm (before the mother has reached 37 weeks of gestation) every year. More than one million of those infants die shortly after birth, and countless others suffer from some type of lifelong disorders. Because they are born too early, they have underdeveloped body parts and therefore kept inside incubators to maintain favorable environmental conditions for them. In developing countries, many premature babies die because of the lack of the care they needed.
ADITI: Affordable incubator suit for premature infants
Manoj Kumar and his team’s work is intended to design an affordable incubator bodysuit for premature babies that can measure heart rate, SpO2, temperature & respiration more comfortably. Since premature babies are born with less body fat, it’s difficult for them to stay warm. Their project, named Affordable DIagnostic Thermal Incubator (ADITI), consists of fabric based resistive filaments that safely provide the required warmth to the neonate. Similarly, pulse oximetry is achieved using MAX30100 device integrated to the baby’s hoodie and measure the blood oxygen saturation from the earlobe.
A powerful STM32F205 microcontroller is used for interfacing various sensors. Sleep modes are used frequently to increase the battery life of the wearable. A Broadcom BCM43438 module is used to provide wireless connectivity to the system and supports both Bluetooth Low Energy and WiFi. Even though WiFi is power consuming, we have used it to directly post the data to the cloud over WiFi in the prototype. The WiFi transmission is done in bursts to conserve battery.
A chip antenna was used to give a low profile design to the system. Commercially available components were chosen to design ADITI. The future iterations would use a Nordic Semiconductors nRF52832 BLE Micro controller for its extremely low power consumption and low cost. Further due to the presence of NFC in the MCU, Pairing would be extremely simple even for parents without prior education.