By Noelle Nelson (pictured above in the Rice360 lab)
My name is Noelle Nelson and I am working on a no-contact vitals monitoring device as part of my fellowship for Rice360.
No-contact Vital Signs Monitor
Newborns are vulnerable to respiratory distress syndrome and apneas that disrupt breathing. These can go undetected or untreated and lead to further complications, which can result in death. Vital signs monitoring is a critical part of life-saving newborn care.
For example, the standard of care for respiratory rate is a manual count of breaths by a caregiver. Unfortunately, manually counting breaths is impractical in a busy hospital. There is a need for a monitor that does not rely on a busy nurse to manually count breaths for all the babies in their ward.
Our no-contact vital signs monitor is designed to monitor babies and alert a nurse to any irregular breathing requiring attention or treatment. It uses a camera to capture video of a baby breathing and then evaluates it using a computer algorithm designed to detect breathing patterns. If the system detects an irregular pattern, the caregivers are notified by an alarm.
Our no-contact vital signs monitoring system could be an improvement on other monitoring systems because it eliminates a set of cords and wires attached to the infant. The cordless design makes it easier for mothers to remove the baby from monitoring to breastfeed their infants or hold them as needed.
The system has the potential to be affordable enough to bring a novel continuous monitoring option to clinical settings that currently rely on overworked nurses to monitor by hand, timing each baby’s breathing.
We are excited to be creating this novel system that could help mothers, babies, and the dedicated medical teams who care for them.
Project Milestones: Algorithm Success
The two parts of the project that are exciting for me as an engineer are 1) algorithm development and 2) system is working!
For the no-contact vital signs monitor, we developed a computer algorithm to analyze video recordings of a baby breathing and detect respiratory rate. A baby’s breath can be hard to detect with the eye, so we designed a computer program that finds the areas of a video where breathing is noticeable and uses these areas to extract a respiratory signal. The algorithm processes the respiratory signal to determine the breathing rate and alert for any concerns.
Every design decision we made supported creating an affordable system suitable for resource-constrained settings.
Recently, I completed a series of benchtop tests to understand the effect of different lighting conditions found in most newborn wards and to optimize the camera position that best captures the breathing rate of the infant. Testing was done with videos of babies breathing collected by other Rice360 fellows as part of respiratory rate monitoring projects. The no-contact vital signs monitor has been able to accurately “calculate” the respiratory rates in these samples.
Design Community: Sharing No-contact Vital Signs Monitoring Success
As part of my fellowship, I gave an oral presentation and presented a poster at Rice360’s Innovation for Day One Conference about the video respiratory rate monitor and the successes we have had. I have also given an oral presentation on the project at the Biomedical Engineering Society’s Annual Meeting in Baltimore this year.
Goals for No-contact Vital Signs Monitoring
This year, I am fine-tuning the video algorithm to improve its accuracy and adaptability to analyze videos. I hope to conduct a clinical study for this project soon. It would be great to observe how the system works in a real clinical setting. The Rice360 no-contact vital signs monitor shows promise to develop to a point where it can be used widely to improve care in neonatal units.
Rice360 Fellowship: How has your Rice360 Global Health Fellowship benefitted you?
The variety of experience I have had as a Rice360 Global Health Fellow have pushed my skills as a designer and engineer. The Rice360 No-contact Vital Signs Monitor project has been highly technical, and it has been rewarding to work on.
I have also had the opportunity to speak about my project to undergraduates and provide mentorship to them. I had an opportunity to travel to our partner institution in Blantyre, Malawi, to test Rice360’s premier respiratory rate project, BreathAlert, which directly informed my work on the video system. It was rewarding to collaborate closely with the researchers and clinicians working in Malawi and with my colleagues here in Houston.
My fellowship has improved my project leadership and research skills. I have a better understanding of how to identify what questions need to be answered and how to design tests or studies to answer those questions.
The fellowship has helped me discover how much I enjoy the research phase of device development. It has been rewarding to create solutions to the technical problems throughout the life of the project. This experience has reinforced my drive to use engineering to make a meaningful impact.
Interested in becoming a Rice360 Global Health Fellow? Apply today!