Development of a neonatal incubator with phototherapy, biometric fingerprint reader, remote monitoring, and heart rate control adapted for developing countries hospitals

This paper aims to develop an automatic neonatal incubator equipped with phototherapy, biometric fingerprint reader, remote monitoring and heart rate control modules for developing countries due to the lack of neonatal incubators. The proposed device consists of an acquisition module that senses temperatures (of the enclosure and the baby) and humidity, a biometric fingerprint reader to identify the user, a remote monitoring module in charge of supervising the temperature and the heart rate of the baby, a video surveillance module which allows filming and transmitting the images to the web server in order to give parents and nurses the possibility of being able to visualize whatever their location the newborn baby, a phototherapy module used to treat newborn jaundice by lowering the bilirubin levels in the baby's blood, a digital control module from a pulse width modulation (PWM) signal generated by a microcontroller of Arduino Nano type for system operation monitoring, and a human machine interface module for setting parameters. The equations describing the energy balance and heat transfer for newborn baby (Ostrowski and Rojczyk, 2018) are taken into account for the implementation of power supply and the choice of the heating resistor. The desired temperature of 37 °C was obtained after only a few minutes inside the incubator.