Browse Topic: Infants
Rear-facing infant seats that are positioned behind front outboard vehicle seats are at risk of being compromised by the rearward yielding of occupied front seat seatbacks during rear-impact collisions. This movement can cause the plastic shell of the infant seat to collapse and deform, increasing the risk of head injuries to the infant. Current designs of rear-facing infant seats typically do not consider the loading effects from the front seatback during rear-impact situations, which results in weak and collapsible shell structures. Moreover, regulatory compliance tests, such as FMVSS 213, do not include assessments of rear-facing infant seats under realistic rear-impact conditions. as the bench used for the regulatory test lacks realistic vehicle interior components. This study emphasizes the need for revised testing methodologies that employ sled tests with realistic seatback intrusion conditions to facilitate the development of improved infant seat designs. Research shows that rear-facing infant seats designed for real-world loading conditions can improve safety and injury outcomes for infants in severe rear-impact collisions in the presence of front-occupied seats.
During the first two years of life, the motor development of children is monitored closely, as motion is the natural base for their other development and interaction with the environment. Current methods do not allow accurate developmental monitoring throughout early childhood.
Engineers have developed a smart lactation pad that can quantify a wide range of chemicals in breast milk in real time. This work is pioneering the first wearable, rapid sensor for at-home measurement of chemicals in breast milk, addressing an important technology gap for improving the health of the mother and the baby.
Neonatal patients in need of specialized care may require transport by rotary-wing air ambulances. These patients are subjected to environmental stressors during transport, including elevated levels of mechanical vibration. Aircraft vibration is transmitted through the transport system and incubator to the patient. The unique vibration profile is dependent on vehicle model and phase of flight. To improve safety for these patients, we aim to evaluate the vibration exposure across this complex system. The purpose of this paper is to present and evaluate the methods used for aircraft data collection and replication of aircraft vibration profiles in a laboratory setting. Our current focus is on neonatal transportation in Ontario, Canada, where Leonardo AW139 helicopters are used for patient transport. AW139 field data were collected and processed to generate excitation profiles for discrete phases of flight. The vehicle data were used to drive a series of laboratory shaker-table experiments, in three axes, to evaluate the response of different configurations of the transport system. We present the methods used to simulate transport conditions, from vehicle data collection to laboratory shaker experimentation, and evaluate the behavior of the test apparatus. The simulated motion has been verified against the aircraft data to identify sources of error in the experimental setup. Some limitations in the shaker and control system present inherent differences in the input and response; however, it was found that the greatest spectral error occurred outside the frequency range of interest (>80 Hz), and that the shaker controller successfully replicates the energy levels recorded in the aircraft. The shaker experiment results, such as the response of the transport system and incubator, will be analysed in future work to identify equipment configurations and/or modifications which can reduce neonatal patient vibration exposure during rotary-wing transportation.
Researchers have developed a pacifier designed to monitor a baby’s electrolyte levels in real time, potentially eliminating the need for repeated invasive blood draws. The team constructed a tiny tunnel, or microfluidic channel, into the body of the pacifier.
Some infants are born prematurely or with medical conditions that require them to stay in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). Typically, these infants spend most of their time in an incubator as it provides a safe and controlled environment. At times, these infants will need to be transported via helicopter from one hospital to another, which exposes their already fragile bodies to higher levels of vibration. Helicopters, while advantageous for medical transport, generate substantial vibration due to rotor dynamics. Current models of incubators lack specific design for reducing vibrations. This project proposes a functional vibration damper that can be integrated into existing neonatal incubators, aiming to enhance infant safety during air transport. ANSYS modeling identified low-density polyethylene foam as an effective material for vibration reduction. Flight simulation tests demonstrated the 2" polyethylene mattress reduced vibrations at low amplitudes and frequencies, but challenges arose at higher values. The prototype addresses the critical need for reducing vibrations in neonatal incubators during air transport. While successful in initial tests, further extensive testing is required for potential implementation in the medical industry.
A low-cost biosensor, called Neosens, will allow doctors to diagnose sepsis in a matter of minutes. Neosens works by detecting interleukin 6, a messenger that’s secreted by newborns’ immune systems in response to a host of biological conditions. It’s also the main early marker for sepsis.
Researchers in Japan have developed the first wearable devices to precisely monitor jaundice, a yellowing of the skin caused by elevated bilirubin levels in the blood that can cause severe medical conditions in newborns. Jaundice can be treated easily by irradiating the infant with blue light that breaks bilirubin down to be excreted through urine. The treatment itself, however, can disrupt bonding time, cause dehydration, and increase the risks of allergic diseases. Neonatal jaundice is one of the leading causes of death and brain damage in infants in low- and middle-income countries.
Smart speakers have proven adept at monitoring certain healthcare issues at home including detecting cardiac arrest or monitoring babies’ breathing. Now, the speakers can be used to track the minute motion of individual heartbeats in a person sitting in front of the speaker.
An interdisciplinary Northwestern University team has developed a pair of soft, flexible wireless sensors that replace the tangle of wire-based sensors that currently monitor babies in hospitals’ neonatal intensive care units (NICU) and pose a barrier to parent-baby cuddling and physical bonding. The lead researcher was John A. Rogers, a bioelectronics pioneer, who led the technology development. The team recently completed a series of first human studies on premature babies at Prentice Women’s Hospital and Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. The researchers concluded that the wireless sensors provided data as precise and accurate as that from traditional monitoring systems. The wireless patches also are gentler on a newborn’s fragile skin and allow for more skin-to-skin contact with the parent. Existing sensors must be attached with adhesives that can scar and blister premature newborns’ skin. The study, involved materials scientists, engineers, dermatologists, and pediatricians. It includes initial data from more than 20 babies who wore the wireless sensors alongside traditional monitoring systems, so the researchers could do a side-by-side, quantitative comparison. Since then, the team has conducted successful tests with more than 70 babies in the NICU.
Researchers are developing early detection technology for Type 1 diabetes that can accurately predict whether a child is at risk of the chronic disease. The researchers hope their detection kit could one day be used as a standard test for newborns, catching the disease in its earliest stages and enabling the development of treatments to delay or even prevent its onset.
To treat newborns for treat, the babies lie in incubators. Irradiation with blue light in an incubator is necessary because toxic decomposition products of the blood pigment hemoglobin are deposited in the skin in newborns with jaundice. Researchers have significantly improved the not-so-child-friendly procedure by combining the treatment with the needs of the newborns.
University of Helsinki Helsinki, Finland
Fine-grained human motion tracing — the ability to trace the trajectory of a moving human hand or leg, or even the whole body — is a general capability that is useful in a wide variety of applications. It can be used for gesture recognition and virtual touch-screens (e.g. Kinect-style natural user interfaces), activity recognition, monitoring of young infants and the elderly, or security applications such as intruder detection. Motivated by these applications, depth-sensing-based systems have been developed to implement motion tracing capabilities in cameras; however, these devices are limited because they have a constrained field of view (around 2 to 4 m range with a 60-degree aperture), and do not work in non-line-of-sight scenarios, preventing their use in many applications such as whole-home activity recognition, security, and elderly care.
Fear of the Zika virus is spreading as images of afflicted infants fill the news. Hoping to foil Zika's rapid advance, researchers from the Wyss Institute in Boston, along with colleagues from Arizona State University, have developed a low-cost ($1 per test), practical diagnostic that can be easily administered, even in areas where resources and medical expertise are scarce.
Spinoff is NASA's annual publication featuring successfully commercialized NASA technology. This commercialization has contributed to the development of products and services in the fields of health and medicine, consumer goods, transportation, public safety, computer technology, and environmental resources.
Children and animals have constantly been forgotten locked inside vehicles and subjected to extreme temperature conditions, which by dozens of times, led them to death. According to statistics compiled by "Kids and Cars", an organization dedicated to prevent child deaths, there were 724 cases of deaths of children caused by asphyxia or by high temperatures in a locked car between 1991 and 2013. This is a worrisome scenario and currently has generated discussion around solutions to the problem. Currently there are ideas and projects seeking for that solution, however they have proved ineffective. This study aims to propose a solution, implementing a system that can assist to the safety of children and animals forgotten in a car. To this end, the system employs a low cost presence sensor, which is ready for reading when the vehicle is turned-off and locked, detecting the presence of a person or animal by an infrared receiver. When the sensor triggers, the system activates the horn and sends a text message to a specified phone number(s) compatible with GSM technology (Global System for Mobile Communications), including the vehicle’s location thru GPS (Global Positioning System). The system in question shows high applicability and low cost, emphasizing that the project represent a very effective security alternative, since it is intrinsic to the vehicle, independent of the driver's attention or memory. Thus, in theory, it is an effective way of preventing more severe outcomes such as those currently taking place.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than one million infants and young children die every year from vaccine-preventable diseases such as pneumococcal disease and rotavirus diarrhoea. Polio is an example of an effective vaccination program. Indeed, the number of people diagnosed with polio has decreased by more than 99 percent since 1988, from approximately 350,000 cases to 1,352 reported cases in 2010. WHO states that the reduction is the result of the global effort to eradicate the disease; and only three countries (Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Pakistan), remain polio-endemic, compared to more than 125 countries in 1988.
There is a concern that the continuing trend on miniaturization (Moore's law) in IC design and fabrication might have a negative impact on the device reliability. To understand and to possibly quantify the physics underlying this concern and phenomenon, it is natural to proceed from the experimental bathtub curve (BTC) - reliability “passport” of the device. This curve reflects the combined effect of two major irreversible governing processes: statistics-related mass-production process that results in a decreasing failure rate with time, and reliability-physics-related degradation (aging) process that leads to an increasing failure rate. It is the latter process that is of major concern of a device designer and manufacturer. The statistical process can be evaluated theoretically, using a rather simple predictive model. Owing to that and assuming that the two processes of interest are statistically independent one can assess the failure rates associated with the aging process from the BTC data by simply subtracting the predicted ordinates of the statistical failure rates (SFR) from the BTC ordinates. The objective of this analysis is to show how this could be done. The suggested methodology proceeds from the concepts that the actual (“instantaneous”) SFR is a random variable with a known (assumed, established) probability distribution, that the experimental BTC can be represented by its infant mortality and the wear-out portions only (the steady-state portion in this case is simply the boundary between the infant mortality and wear-out portions) and that the two BTC portions considered can be approximated analytically. The cases, when the “instantaneous” SFR is distributed normally and in accordance with the Rayleigh law are used as suitable illustrations of the general concept. The developed methodology can be employed when there is a need to better understand the relative roles of the statistics-related and physics-of-failure-related processes in reliability evaluations of electronic products. The methodology can be used also beyond the field of IC engineering, when there is a need to understand and, hence, to separate the roles of the two irreversible processes in question. One of the major challenges of the future work is to determine the probability distributions of the actual (“instantaneous”) SFRs for particular products and applications.
Vibration is both a source of discomfort and a possible risk to human health. There have been numerous studies and knowledge exists regarding the vibrational behavior of vehicle seats on adult human occupants. Children are more and more becoming regular passengers in the vehicle. However, very little knowledge available regarding the vibrational behavior of child safety seats for children. Therefore, the objective of this study was to measure the vibrations in three different baby car seats and to compare these to the vibrations at the interface between the driver and the automobile seat. The test was performed on the National road at the average speed of 70 km/h and acceleration levels were recorded for about 350 Sec (5.83 min). One male driver considered as an adult occupant and a dummy having a mass of 9 kg was representing one year old baby. Four accelerometers were used to measure the vibration. All measured accelerations were relative to the vertical direction. Vibration Analysis Toolset (VATS) was used for time domain analysis. Based on the ISO 2631-1's levels of discomfort, all the baby car seats acceleration levels were between 0.315 - 0.63 m/s2 level, which showed that baby car seats considered were little uncomfortable for the baby occupants. The baby car seat 3 comparatively had a lesser exposure to vibration (i.e., lesser VDV value) and better vibration isolation property than other baby car seats.
A team of engineers and cardiology experts at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Children’s Center have teamed up to develop a biosensor that could alert doctors when serious brain injury occurs to an infant or child during heart surgery. By doing so, the device could help doctors devise new ways to minimize brain damage or begin treatment more quickly.
A newborn is diagnosed with a heart condition called hypoplastic left heart syndrome in which the left ventricle of the heart is severely underdeveloped, and requires immediate surgery. While there are different surgical options to consider, parents and doctors face a daunting decision of selecting the best procedure, as each poses its own unique benefits and risks. However, today’s advanced technology, like simulation, allow doctors to virtually “clone” the newborn, create an accurate computer model of its heart, run several virtual surgeries, and determine the best type of implantable device in order to determine the outcome of each protocol and select the safest option for actual surgery.
Research has shown that music has a profound effect on the human body and psyche. The practice of music therapy is based on well-researched clinical and empirical evidence. There is evidence-based proof that music can aid in many different areas, such as pain management, depression, and anxiety. Scientific studies show that music can actually stimulate the activity of the brain and that lullabies are soothing, rhythmic stimuli that help with the organization of the brain. Music has been shown to produce a calming experience for infants in the NICU, allowing them to return to quiet sleep more quickly following stressful medical procedures.
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