An IoT based Vitals Monitoring System for Babies in Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

The neonatal period represents the initial 28 days of delivery. This period is the most critical time for a child's survival. Usually, the doctors monitor these babies in Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICU) if the babies develop any infections, respiratory distress syndrome (RDS), hypoglycemia, or maternal chorioamnionitis. This paper proposes a sensing system that monitors heart rate, respiratory rate, body temperature, and blood oxygenation levels for a newborn baby admitted to a NICU. The system also tracks supplementary information, such as the baby's movement, cry, or orientation, which are helpful for clinical analysis. The system employs IoT technology to wirelessly collect the data from the sensors and relay the information to doctors or nurses. The doctors can use a mobile application or a web-based dashboard to monitor the status of all the babies in the NICU. The proposed system is low cost and energy-efficient compared to the existing baby monitoring systems used in NICUs. For proof of concept development, we categorised the babies into three categories and developed an algorithm to optimise the sensor activation. This paper describes the system architecture and algorithms for the proposed system and discusses the energy and cost optimisation.