Mimo pillow : an intelligent cushion designed with maternal heart beat vibrations for comforting newborn infants

Premature infants are subject to numerous interventions ranging from a simple diaper change to surgery while residing in Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs). These neonates often suffer from pain, distress and discomfort during the first weeks of their lives. Although pharmacological pain treatment often is available, it cannot always be applied to relieve a neonate from pain or discomfort. This paper describes a non-pharmacological solution, called Mimo, which provides comfort through mediation of a parent's physiological features to the distressed neonate via an intelligent pillow system embedded with sensing and actuating functions. We present the design, the implementation and the evaluation of the prototype. Clinical tests at Máxima Medical Centre in the Netherlands show that among the 9 of 10 infants who showed discomfort following diaper change, a shorter recovery time to baseline Skin Conductance Analgesimeter (SCA) values could be measured when the maternal heartbeat vibration in the Mimo was switched on and in 7 of these 10 a shorter crying time was measure

Design of a smart textile mat to study pressure distribution on multiple foam material configurations

In this paper, we present a design of a smart textile pressure mat to study the pressure distribution with multiple foam material configurations for neonatal monitoring at Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICU). A smart textile mat with 64 pressure sensors has been developed including software at the Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). The developed sensory mat is able to measure pressure distribution of a neonate inside an incubator, which is expected to provide information for comfort assessment. Experiments at Philips Research and Máxima Medical Centre in the Netherlands demonstrate that the pressure distribution is affected by multiple foam material configurations