Wireless Skin Sensors For Newborns Will Let Parents Cuddle Fragile Babies

the_newsbeagle writes: In newborn intensive care units (NICUs) today, tiny fragile babies lie in incubators, wired to a variety of monitors that track their vital signs. This mess of wires makes it complicated for nurses to pick up the babies for routine tasks like diaper changes, and makes it hard for new parents to pick up their infants for cuddling. Skin-to-skin contact between parents and infants has been proven not only to help with bonding, but also to have a host of medical benefits for the infants, so the wires that tether babies to their beds are a real problem. At Northwestern University, an electrical engineer who works on flexible, stretchable electronics teamed up with a pediatric dermatologist to invent a solution. They devised a system of stick-on wireless biosensors (with a gentle adhesive that's safe even for thin preemie skin) that actually provide more information than today's standard setup. The system 'is composed of two sensors, one that sticks to the chest to record electrocardiograms (providing heart rate), another that sticks to the foot to record photoplethysmograms (measuring blood oxygenation) and skin temperature,' reports IEEE Spectrum. 'The foot sensor required the engineering team to create software that could compensate for movement artifacts in the data. Time-syncing these two sensors also provides a continuous measurement of blood pressure; the system knows when the heart pumps out a pulse of blood and when it arrives at the foot, and that time measurement correlates well with blood pressure.' 'The sensors use near-field communication (NFC) to connect to a module that can be attached to the baby's bed, and which both receives the data and sends wireless power to the sensors,' the report adds. 'That module transmits the data via bluetooth to a mobile phone or tablet.'

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