In newborn intensive care units, nurses work around the clock to care for sick or premature babies. They make sure the hospital’s tiniest patients are sleeping the right way — through a group of bioengineering students at Syracuse University, they’ll get an extra set of hands.

Bioengineering majors Alyssa Anderson, Ao Li, Tierney Clark and Sarah Venn designed a newborn sleep monitor for infants in neonatal intensive care units during this past academic year. The device monitors newborn sleep positions, detecting whether they are on their back, side or stomach by measuring pressure points. The group finished an early stage of the design last month for their senior capstone, but there’s a chance the project will be continued in the fall by other engineering students.  

“When babies are in the NICU, they are placed in a variety of positions to help with their motor development,” said SUNY Upstate Medical University associate professor Karen Klingman, who met with the students a few times to discuss project plans. She said the goal is to optimize the time that NICU infants are placed on their backs so they are used to it by the time they go home.

Anderson, Li and Clark started working on the project in fall 2017 for their senior design class. The first semester was spent designing the high-level experiment, creating a design notebook and talking with researchers at Upstate Medical University to learn how the device can best suit their needs.

Venn joined in January, when the group was ordering materials for the project. The spring semester was spent constructing the monitor itself — designing the circuit by hand, laying copper foil in the mat’s insulating fabric and coding a data interface. Pun To Yung, an assistant professor and bioengineering program director, guided the students and led workshops on different aspects of design.

“What we did was a great first stepping stone in the design process, but there’ll definitely have to be some sort of regulatory approval before it is entered into the hospital and used as a research tool,” Venn said.

The students presented their design at the Northeast Bioengineering Conference in March at Philadelphia’s Drexel University. The group presented in the pediatric and rehabilitation bioengineering category and met different neonatal research groups.

Klingman hopes the project will continue in the fall, since Venn and Clark have one more semester before graduation. Venn said she’ll be working on a new project for her senior design class in the fall, but she predicts the NICU monitor project will be passed onto students in the design class, which is open to freshmen through junior students. She said she would like to be a teaching assistant in the class so she can see other students bring the device to fruition.

Said Klingman: “The next step is to get it so that it’s something researchers like me could use so we don’t have to carry around a computer and a breadboard.”

Published on June 11, 2018 at 9:32 am

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