University of Tasmania, Australia

Helping Premature Babies Breathe

Breathing is the most difficult thing for premature babies to do because of their immature lungs. Current assistance simply involves enriching air with oxygen and sometimes applying positive pressure to the airways. The difficulty in automatically maintaining blood oxygen levels within optimal or even safe ranges has meant we have not progressed beyond manual control of oxygen levels by nursing staff. However, despite Australian hospitals having a dedicated intensive care nursing staff for each baby, baby blood oxygen levels still typically swing wildly and are difficult to control. Developing countries in particular cannot provide comparable levels of care to western countries and their babies often suffer serious consequences, including blindness and mental retardation. This is emerging as a major health problem. We have conducted a pilot project measuring oxygen levels in premature babies in an Australian hospital, and this has indicated problems even here in Australia. We have also developed a prototype automated oxygen control system designed to automatically regulate oxygen levels in a baby’s blood. We wish to do more measurements on babies, trial our automated system and develop suitable control algorithms. It is expected that there will need to be some important enhancements that will need to be made to our system to achieve the desired levels of performance, including respiration monitoring of premature babies and embedding of expert knowledge. This project is to join in this current research of oxygen level control in premature babies. Research topics may involve further assessment of current practice, further development and trialing of our automated system, and development of respiratory models and prediction algorithms.