Research and developmet of Behavior Monitoring System(BMR) for premature baby under intensive care

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The prematurely born infant begins extra-uterine life in the very unusual environment of an incubator. When designing incubators, although they are aimed at sustaining life and enhancing the possibility of the intact survival of the prematurely born infant, it is very important to also consider the environmental conditions of incubators in terms of the infants' behavioral development and communication.The technology that supports human communication and its development is called "Human Interface". When considering the human interface with machines, the notion of "User Friendly" emphasizes the easy operation of the machine. However the human interface also emphasizes that the machine should be designed to eliminate communication barriers among people around machines. We can utilize the human interface technology to consider the incubator environment.From this point or view, we investigated the incubator environmental characteristics associated with intensive care and examined their influence on the behaviors of extremely premature infants and medical nursing staff. We also developed a computer-based behavior monitoring robot (BMR) for measuring the influence of the incubator environment on infants' behaviors.BMR monitored that extremely premature infants in incubators showed various kinds of behaviors including emotional expressions in response to the environmental stimulation caused by the activities of medical nursing staff in the neonatal intensive care unit, while we observed that behaviors of the medical nursing staff were not responsive to the infants' communicative behaviors, because of the human interface problem in the incubator environment and the nursing program. These results suggested there is a need to reconsider the environmental conditions of neonatal intensive care and to develop a new paradigm of intensive care which would allow behavioral interactions between an infant and a caretaker.