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Arduino Based Infant Monitoring System

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2017 IOP Conf. Ser.: Mater. Sci. Eng. 226 012095

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International Research and Innovation Summit (IRIS2017) IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 226 (2017) 012095 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/226/1/012095
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Arduino Based Infant Monitoring System

Daing Noor Farhanah Mohamad Ishak1, Muhammad Mahadi Abdul Jamil1, * and
Radzi Ambar1, 2
1
Biomedical Modelling and Simulation (BIOMEMS) Research Group,
Department of Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Electrical and Electronic
Engineering, Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, 86400 Parit Raja, Johor,
Malaysia
2
Embedded Computing System (EmbCoS) Research Group,
Department of Computer Engineering,
Faculty of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Universiti Tun Hussein Onn
Malaysia, 86400 Parit Raja, Johor, Malaysia

Corresponding author: [email protected]

Abstract. This paper proposes a system for monitoring infant in an incubator and records the
relevant data into a computer. The data recorded by the system can be further referred by the
neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) personnel for diagnostic or research purposes. The study
focuses on designing the monitoring system that consists of an incubator equipped with
humidity sensor to measure the humidity level, and a pulse sensor that can be attached on an
infant placed inside the incubator to monitor infant’s heart pulse. The measurement results
which are the pulse rate and humidity level are sent to the PC via Arduino microcontroller. The
advantage of this system will be that in the future, it may also enable doctors to closely monitor
the infant condition through local area network and internet. This work is aimed as an example
of an application that contributes towards remote tele-health monitoring system.

1. Introduction
Preterm birth, more commonly known as premature birth, is the birth of a baby less than thirty seven
week gestational age, or less than two kilogram weight. Premature birth may cause babies to have less
time to develop in the womb, which in turn expose them to complicated medical problems. For
example, most premature babies have respiratory problems due to the lung not reaching its maturity
stage. In addition, most babies also have trouble maintaining body temperature. In hospital procedure,
premature babies will be monitored in the incubator and placed in the neonatal intensive care unit
(NICU). However, incubators in rural hospitals do not have the ability to provide pediatricians with
real-time monitoring.
The incubator system in all hospital’s NICU currently require nurses and doctors to monitor infants
manually all the time. However, these hospital personnel are also required to do other work at the
same time. Thus, motivated by this problem, this project is designed to help them monitor the baby in
incubator more efficiently. In this project, a monitoring system which utilizes humidity sensor and
pulse rate sensor is developed to measure the humidity in incubator, and baby’s heartbeat respectively.
The data collected from the sensors can be viewed on a personal computer (PC) and an alarm system

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International Research and Innovation Summit (IRIS2017) IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 226 (2017) 012095 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/226/1/012095
1234567890

will also alert NICU personnel if the data readings reach to certain level that can harm babies. The aim
of this project is to provide an effective system for increasing NICU personnel’s productivity and
efficiency at work.
This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 outlines the literature review related to various
designs of incubator for infants. The proposed infant incubator system and experimental methods are
discussed in section 3 and 4, respectively. The experimental results and discussion are described in
section 5. Finally, a brief conclusion is given in section 6.

2. Literature Review
There are many designs of incubator for infants in the literatures. In recent work, Dive and Kulkarni
designed an incubator that can monitor and detect the light inside the incubator, and also audio or
voice of the baby [1]. The proposed incubator system can notify doctor and nurse about the baby's
condition, as when the baby cries, the alarm will be triggered and the alarm will stop or deactivated
only if someone turned it off. The advantage of the work is it helps doctors and nurses to monitor the
baby's condition continuously. For future improvement, they recommended adding parameters such as
monitoring of heart pulse and humidity. Costa et al. [2] developed a newborn incubator that can check
the conditions of the incubator environment by utilizing a humidity control system. They concluded
that the control of humidity could contribute to the thermos-neutral of the environment, thus
improving the premature newborns’ quality of life. There are also several infant incubator designs that
implement temperature control system [3-4]. However, following caregiving, infant and incubator
temperature differed significantly over time by incubator control mode (air mode control or skin
temperature mode control) [5]. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the temperature effects of
caregiving when developing incubators. There are several others unresolved issues in developing
infant incubators such as exposure to high noise levels in NICU, incubator’s surrounding light
environment and electromagnetic fields (EMFs) impact on infant health to name a few [6].
Based on the literature above, monitoring of humidity level and measurement of infant’s pulse rate
are important parameters to be considered in designing an infant incubator. Furthermore, an alarm
system that can detect both parameters are nearing safety level threshold, and then, alert caregivers
about this situation is also essential to prevent harmful situation. Therefore, the proposed infant
monitoring system will consist of an alarm system and sensors that can measure incubator’s humidity
level and monitor heart pulse rate.

Figure 1. Pulse rate sensor Figure 2. Humidity sensor

3. The Proposed Infant Incubator System

In this work, an Arduino Uno microcontroller is used to process the data from sensors. Arduino Uno is
a microcontroller board with ATmega328. It has 14 input pin of digital output 6 wherein the input pin
can be used as PWM outputs and 6 analog input pin, 16 MHz crystal oscillator, a USB, power jack,
ICSP header, and a reset button. This work also utilizes a unit of SN-PULSE pulse rate sensor. It is a
plug-and-play heart sensor that can detect the pulse per minute for premature babies continuously.
Figure 1 shows the image of a SN-PULSE pulse sensor. The proposed incubator utilizes a humidity
sensor to detect humidity in the incubator. Figure 2 shows the image of a SN-model-MOD HMD
humidity sensor to measure humidity. The proposed incubator is also equipped with an LCD display to
show the humidity inside the incubator. Furthermore, humidity and pulse rate data are processed by

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International Research and Innovation Summit (IRIS2017) IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 226 (2017) 012095 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/226/1/012095
1234567890

the Arduino and sent to the PC for continuous monitoring. Figure 3 shows the flow chart of the infant
monitoring system.

START

Humidity level and infant’s heart rate are measured

Data collected from sensor show on pc

Alarm system will turn ON if the data readings reach near danger level

STOP

Figure 3. Flow chart of the infant monitoring system

4. Experimental Methods
As explained in the previous section, the proposed infant incubator is consists of a monitoring system
which utilizes humidity sensor and pulse rate sensor to measure the humidity in incubator, and baby’s
heartbeat respectively. Thus, the experimental methods are focused on these two parameters to show
the usefulness of the sensors.
First, sensing the heartbeat of a baby is a little bit different compared to adult. Based on the work
done by Kattwinkel et al. [7], to measure heart rate of a baby, a pulse oximeter should be placed on the
right hand or wrist of the infant to obtain heart rate measurement. So, in this work, instead of using a
pulse oximeter, a pulse rate sensor is placed on the right hand or wrist of an infant to measure baby’s
pulse rate continuously. Table 1 shows the normal pulse rate for infants and children. In this
experiment, the sensor readings were taken from babies from three categories only based on Table 1,
which are newborn (0 ~ 3 months), infants (3 ~ 6 months) and infants (6 ~ 12 months).
Then, humidity readings in the incubator were taken continuously by placing the humidity sensor
inside the incubator. The experiment was carried out in air-conditioned rooms, which has riskier
moisture condition. This is because the moisture in the air-conditioning is lower compared to normal
rooms. Moreover, the humidity sensor is also tested with extremely hot condition (by placing the
sensor near a fire source) and extremely cold condition (by placing the sensor in a container full of ice
cubes) for the reliability test. Regarding the information for preparation of incubators, for infants less
than 37 weeks gestational age and/or less than 2 kg body weight must be placed in the incubator that
can provide humidification within 24-48 hours of life [8]. Humidity values for gestational age infants
less than 37 weeks are in the range between 64% to 94%.

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International Research and Innovation Summit (IRIS2017) IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 226 (2017) 012095 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/226/1/012095
1234567890

Table 1. Normal pulse rate for infants and children.

Age Pulse Rate Range (BPM)

Newborn baby (0 ~ 3 months) 100 ~ 150
Infants (3 ~ 6 months) 90 ~ 120
Infants (6 ~ 12 months) 80 ~ 120
Children (1 ~ 10 year) 70 ~ 130
Children 10 years old and above 60 ~ 100

5. Experimental Results and Discussion

As explained in the previous section, the proposed infant incubator is consists of a monitoring system.
In this section, the experimental results of the sensors utilized in this work are described.

5.1. Pulse Rate Sensor Experiment Result

Prior to the experiment, first, a pulse rate sensor is attached on the right hand or wrist of an infant to
obtain heart rate measurement. The sensor must then be left for a minute to get a proper reading. The
collected data were divided into three sections according to baby’s age. Table 2 shows the result of
infant’s pulse rate compared to results from the work done by Fleming et al. [9] (benchmark). As
shown in the table, the sensor shows results within the range of the benchmark results. These results
demonstrate the usefulness of the chosen pulse rate sensor for the proposed infant monitoring system.
Figure 4 shows the pulse rate of an infant shown in real-time developed using Processing software.

Table 2. Result of infant’s pulse rate.

Age Infants Results (BPM)
Infants 1 132
0 ~ 3 Months
Infants 2 143
(Results of BPM in Fleming et al. (2011): 100 ~ 150)
Infants 3 127
Infants 4 93
3 ~ 6 Months
Infants 5 107
(Results of BPM in Fleming et al. (2011): 90 ~ 120)
Infants 6 112
Infants 7 97
6 ~ 12 Months
Infants 8 93
(Results of BPM in Fleming et al. (2011): 80 ~ 120)
Infants 9 111

Window
showing live
pulse waveform
Window
showing heart
rate updates
every beat

Figure 4. Software displaying the pulse rate of an infant.

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International Research and Innovation Summit (IRIS2017) IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 226 (2017) 012095 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/226/1/012095
1234567890

5.2. Humidity Sensor Experiment Result

A SN-HMD-MOD humidity sensor is used in this project. The sensor has a fast response time and low
power consumption which is suitable for medical applications. When the sensor is placed inside the
incubator, it will detect the moisture around it. The data is transferred to the Arduino and then
processed to be sent to a PC for further analysis. An LCD also will show the current humidity inside
the incubator.
The proposed infant monitoring system will have an alarm system that can detect both parameters
are nearing safety level threshold, and then, alert caregivers about this situation is also essential to
prevent harmful situation. Unfortunately, at the current stage, the alarm system is still under
development. However, the plan for the alarm system to work is to use the humidity level as alarm
input. The sensor will work to ensure that the humidity incubators are always in the range of 64% ~
94%. If the reading exceeds the upper and lower limits of this range, an LED will turn OFF, while a
buzzer will be turned ON to alert the NICU personnel as shown in Table 3. Figure 5 shows the circuit
for the hardware prototype of the proposed Arduino based infant monitoring system.

Table 3. Expected results for the alarm system based on incubator’s humidity level.

RANGE 65% and below 64% - 94% 95% and above

DANGER IDEAL DANGER

RESULT - LED OFF - LED ON - LED OFF
- BUZZER ON - BUZZER OFF - BUZZER ON

Figure 5. Circuit for the hardware prototype.

6. Conclusion
In conclusion, the objective of this project has been successfully achieved in which the pulse rate
sensor can detect the infant’s pulse rate for three levels of ages, from 0 to 3 months, 3 to 6 months and
lastly 6 to 12 months. For validation purposes, the results are compared with the results of previous
work which show that the results. Meanwhile, the humidity sensor can also detect the moisture in the
incubator and an alarm system will be developed which can alert the doctors and nurses if the moisture
level falls in danger situation. Thus, it is hoped that this could help doctors and nurses in monitoring
premature infants in hospital. Furthermore, they can also provide fast response if the infants in danger
conditions. In order to further improve the project in the future, the data from both sensors will be sent
via the internet to a laptop or mobile phone. This can help the doctors and nurses to monitor the infants

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International Research and Innovation Summit (IRIS2017) IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 226 (2017) 012095 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/226/1/012095
1234567890

conditions anywhere at all time. Most doctors in the hospital have very tight schedule and cannot
always be in the NICU. They also have responsibilites to other patients at the same time. With this
transmission of data via the Internet, caregivers will be able to monitor infant environment condition
and health situation from a laptop or mobile phone with much ease.

7. Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank Supervisor, Associate Professor Dr. Muhammad Mahadi Bin Abdul
Jamil for his insightful discussions and encouragement in finishing this project and performing
enhancement studies.

References
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of Infants. Int. Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Software
Engineering, Vol. 3, Issue 1, pp. 541-546.
[2] Costa, J. L., et al. (2009). Humidity control system in newborn incubator. Proceedings of the
XIX Ime-ko World Congress Fundamental and Applied Metrology, pp. 1760-1764.
[3] Otalora, A. S., Molano, C. A. Q. and Tovar, O. M. L. (2013). Design and implementation of a
prototype for neonatal intensive care incubator with fuzzy controller. ARPN Journal of
Engineering and Applied Sciences. 8(8):677-686.A reference Parekh, D. (2010). Designing
heart rate, blood pressure and body temperature sensors for mobile on-call system. Bachelor
Degree Thesis. McMaster University.
[4] Tisa, T., A., Nisha, Z., A. and Kiber, M., A. (2012). Design of an Enhanced Temperature
Control System for Neonatal Incubator. Bangladesh Journal of Medical Physics. 5(1): 53-62.
[5] Thomas, K., A. (2003). Preterm Infant Thermal Responses to Caregiving Differ by Incubator
Control Mode. J. Perinatol. 23(8): 640-645.
[6] Antonucci, R., et al. (2010) The infant incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit: unresolved
issues and future developments. Journal of Perinatal Medicine. 37(6): 587-98.
[7] Kattwinkel, J., et al. (2010). Part 15: neonatal resuscitation. 2010 American Heart Association
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[8] Agren, J., Sjörs, G. and Sedin, G. (2006). Ambient Humidity Influences the Rate of Skin Barrier
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[9] Fleming, S., et al., (2011). Normal ranges of heart rate and respiratory rate in children from birth
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