Parent-Centric Kangaroo Mother Care Wearable

Yamile Jackson of Nurtured by Design in the U.S. will develop a digital, wearable wrap with biosensors and a smartphone application to monitor kangaroo mother care - skin-to-skin contact between mother and infant - in low-resource areas, and improve its duration and frequency. The sensors will monitor the infant's temperature, position, and heart rate, and transmit the data to a smartphone provided to the mother, and to the cloud to be monitored by healthcare teams. The application will contain a user-friendly graphical interface and will also provide the mothers with information on the importance of kangaroo mother care and enable them to communicate with other mothers and health workers. They will build and test a prototype at a local research university with the participation of local kangaroo care leaders.