Premature babies are vulnerable, so you have to keep them warm and monitor their vital signs. Today, the babies have to be in an incubator, covered with all kinds of wires and patches. The patches give a lot of skin damage when they’re removed, and also a lot of pain and stress for the baby. So that’s why startup Bambi Medical designed the skin friendly Bambi Belt Solution.
Bambi Belt Introduction.
Reducing pain and stress in babies and improve the parent-child bonding
Bambi Belt is a skin-friendly, wireless neonatal vital sign monitoring system. It accomplishes the same functions as wired adhesive electrode systems currently implemented in NICUs. A disposable belt functions by being wrapped around baby’s chest. Sensors integrated inside Bambi Belt measure critical data in a nonintrusive way, while Bambi Bridge sends the captured data to Bambi Monitor. The solution works either stand-alone or in combination with existing patient monitors within the hospital infrastructure. As a result, non-sticky texture of the belt eliminates pain and stress of babies. While its wireless features allow parents to take baby out of the incubator and perform Kangaroo Mother Care.
Bambi-Belt communicates wirelessly with a base station where the algorithms detect the vital signs. These signals are communicated to the patient monitor.
Bambi-Belt prototype
During my involvement as interim-CTO we have developed a prototype of the Bambi Belt, which was instrumental in raising funds during the initial funding round. We have measured a clear and consistent signal from multiple babies over a significant period of time and received very positive feedback both from parents and nurses. Parents find the Bambi Belt makes it easier to hold their baby while in the incubator and nurses like the fact that they don’t need to hurt the child when applying the belt.
One of the early prototypes which was used during the Proof of Concept validation.
Testing the performance of the electrodes by analyzing the signal quality.
Details
Company: Bambi-Medical
Partners: Holst Centre, Demcon, Eindhoven University of Technology
My role in collaboration: As interim-CTO my role was to lead the product-development of the proof of concept prototype of Bambi-Belt. This included the following activities: determining technical product requirements, creating a development roadmap together with partners, sourcing materials, hands-on prototyping activities in lab, writing patent application in collaboration with patent attorney.
The present document describes a wearable device for monitoring one or more vital signs of a human body, the device comprising a carrier suitable for being worn around an abdominal part of the body, and an electrode arrangement comprising a plurality of conductive electrodes, wherein the electrodes are arranged on the carrier such as to be brought in contact with a skin of the body in use, and wherein the electrodes are arranged for receiving electric physiologic signals from the body for enabling monitoring of a membrane potential of one or more muscles in the body, wherein the electrodes comprise one or more first electrodes arranged on the carrier such as to be in contact with a side part of a torso of the body, such as to receive via said first electrodes a first electrical signal indicative of a membrane potential of a thoracic diaphragm of the body; wherein the carrier further comprises at least one second electrode in addition to the one or more first electrodes, the at least one second electrode being arranged on the carrier such as to be in contact with a mid front part of the abdominal part of the body, the at least one second electrode thereby being arranged for receiving a second electrical signal indicative of one or more further electric physiologic signals from the body, for enabling filtering of the first electrical signal using the second electrical signal for enabling electromyography of the thoracic diaphragm.
@misc{patent-wearable-device-monitoring-vital-signs,title={Wearable device, method and system for monitoring one or more vital signs of a human body},author={Oetomo, Sidarto Bambang and {ten Bhömer}, Martijn and Caparelli, Claudia},year={2018},month=mar,publisher={Google Patents},note={WIPO Patent WO2018056811A1, US Patent US12310750B2},type={patent},}
