Grant: Operating Grant

Premature birth, defined as birth before 37 completed weeks estation, has been identified as one of the most important health problems for babies in developed nations. Immature newborn babies often have quite complex medical conditions that require the sophisticated care provided within level III Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs). In 2009, the March of Dimes Foundation released a report that shows that premature birth is actually on the rise. Doctors and nurses who look after these babies within NICUs need to quickly and accurately analyse and interpret data shown on a number of medical devices to provide optimal care for these babies while they grow and develop. Despite the availability of newer information technologies in the NICU, most tasks performed by neonatologists, nurses, and other healthcare providers are manual as there is no system which integrates the data from all the different medical devices used on a baby on an ongoing basis. Recent medical research has discovered that nosocomial infection and other conditions of the premature and/or critically ill newborn may have common early indicators in aspects that are seemingly unrelated such as heart rate and breathing rate. In our research we have created a system that is capable of receiving and analysing a range of data from the babies and looking for patterns in a flexible way. We have begun initial testing for nosocomial infection in real-time. Within this application we will use retrospective analysis of historical data to look for early onset indicators for two other conditions and then test algorithms that watch for these behabiours in real time.