For at-risk infants, the medicinal potency of skin-to-skin contact with their mothers cannot be denied. The World Health Organization officially recognizes Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) as an official form of healthcare.
KMC reduced mortality by 40% among hospitalized infants with a low birth weight.
However, current devices used to monitor infants held by their mothers or caregivers involve cumbersome, complicated, and ineffective hardware such as rigid sensors and wires/electrodes placed on an infant’s body.
A study published by an engineering team from Columbia University claims they devised a better, simpler solution.
Meet ‘Joey’: a fabric necklace worn by the caregiver while holding the baby. It allows caregivers to monitor a KMC session continuously and provides two sets of data: heart rate and respiration rate.
According to Columbia University, continuous monitoring of KMC is a preventative form of health care, helping to mitigate risk, lower stress levels, and even encourage weight gain.
Joey, a fabric necklace that’s sensitive to the touch
The name comes from the way in which baby kangaroos – aka joeys – stay in their mother’s pouch.
“With a minimalist fabric sensor structure,” the study from Columbia states, Joey measures KMC duration via the presence of mixed ECG signals. It then isolates the infant’s ECG from this mixture with a proposed signal extraction algorithm and employs a diffusion-based denoising model to mitigate motion artifacts, enabling reliable inference of infant’s vital signs.”
Xia Zhou spearheaded the project with an engineering team from Columbia University whose work as an associate professor focuses on mobile computing and networks, according to Columbia Engineering.
Another associate professor of engineering at Columbia University experimented with microphones, but as we’re seeing across science, even gaming , Zhou explored fabric-based technologies for its flexibility and usability.
By weaving conductive threads through a fabric sensor with a kangaroo design on one side and a heart on the other, the device picks up on the electrical signals (ECG). Computational algorithms then enable it to read vital signs from the heart beat.
It even has a foolproof motion detector built into it to factor in motion, adjusting the baby, for example. All that data gets sent to an app on a mobile device, providing mothers with that information directly.
Joey is approved for use during Kangaroo Mother Care
“I am very excited about our findings because they demonstrate the promising potential of physiological sensing using everyday conductive fabrics, a ubiquitous and natural sensing medium,” Qijia Shao lead author of the study told Columbia Engineering.
For the study, researchers collaborated with Columbia’s neonatal pediatricians, Columbia Engineering reported. After testing the device with 35 participants and interviewing eight pediatricians of Neonatology, they were able to confirm “the usability of Joey’s sensing fabric for infant skin,” 96% accurate, the study outlined.
Fabrics continue to open new doors toward more convenient technological solutions that take up less physical space and are more adaptable to movement. The app Columbia has created connected to Joey can detect whether or not the baby needs more KMC, an invaluable measurement, as skin-to-skin contact is a dose of therapy, and it gives the mother more assurance that the infant is receiving the care that it needs from her.
If the device picks up on any disturbance in the infant’s vital signs, it alerts the caregiver right away, according to New Atlas .
So goodbye to heavy, bulky, archaic hardware. Hello to flexible wearable technologies easy to use and cost-efficient, especially for hospitals with limited resources.
Joey stands to make quite a tender impact on infant care, especially in high-risk situations.
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