The Neonatal Monitoring Team:
Wes, Melody, Jackie, and Allie
We're a team of engineering students in the Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design at Johns Hopkins University, working to develop a neonatal vital signs monitor for use in low-resource settings.This past summer, members of our team traveled to Nepal and Indonesia to identify needs related to maternal health and neonatal care. If you would like to read more about our summer experiences, check out our past blogs here and here!
Following our summer field immersions, we identified a need for healthcare workers in overcrowded hospitals to be able to tell when fragile preterm babies were experiencing subtle signs of distress, in order to be able to provide rapid lifesaving care. That led us to our current project: a low-cost, integrated newborn vital signs monitor.
For the next three weeks, we will be traveling to Nepal, visiting different hospitals to observe newborn care and talk to caregivers about their current practices and challenges. Our summer experiences offered incredible breadth, and we hope to use this trip to add the depth we need to truly understand the needs and constraints of Nepalese hospitals as we narrow in on a design.
Wes and Allie will be the first two to arrive in Nepal, followed by Melody and Jackie a week later. We'll do our best to share our experiences along the way, but if we drop off the radar for a bit, don't be alarmed- it probably means we have limited wifi, or we're getting over jet lag!
Thanks for reading! Namaste!
~ The Neonatal Monitoring Team
No comments:
Post a Comment