The goal of our product is to help newborns maintain a warm body temperature after birth while waiting for the umbilical cord to be clamped during a delayed clamp. Thus, our product will maintain the body temperature of the newborn, helping prevent a temperature imbalance within the body.
The blanket would be designed to be both lightweight and comfortable for the newborn ensuring there is no potential for burns or harm along with not much weight on the baby to allow efficient breathing and mobility. To these criteria’s a blanket made out of a strong plastic, vacuum metallized film, and infrared reflective coating of aluminum applied as vapor would be essential to be life saving. In essence a plastic sheeting layered with cotton would be used; it’s engineered to be heat reflective and thin sheeting to make it more safe and comfortable for a newborn. By using this material it helps reduce loss of body heat along with convenient use and storage with long lasting use of between one to two years; as well as its effectiveness costing about $1.25 to produce per blanket.
- “Cart basket” is included which is put below and next to the patient so it allows gravity to efficiently lay the newborn after birth comfortably into the blanket.
TESTING
To test our design, we can use our product on newborn babies that are already a few days old. We can set our blanket to a given temperature, ideally slightly warmer than room to minimize the chance of the infant going cold, but also keep it from getting too hot. As mentioned earlier, it is important to ensure that the temperature isn’t too hot nor too cold, otherwise that may lead to health complications such as hypothermia or death. To heat the blanket, we will use the remote and set a temperature to heat prior to birth. Once the blanket is warm enough, we can wrap it around the newborn for about thirty seconds and closely monitor the temperature of the newborn while they are wrapped within the blanket. If the blanket doesn’t heat or cool off, our alternative is a microwavable blanket that also subtracts the remote element from our primary design. This would eliminate any potential issues stemming from the remote, and rely more on heating the blanket up once and rely more on it to cool over time. If the primary design trial succeeds without any complications, we can extend the time the newborn is wrapped within the blanket further, again closely monitoring their temperature ensuring that they are not too hot nor too cold. The goal should be to keep the newborn wrapped in the blanket as long as possible without the infant losing any heat or becoming too warm, preferably for about three to five minutes, which is the typical amount of time to wait for clamping the umbilical cord.
ALTERNATIVE
One concern that we have with our device is the newborn getting too warm over the course of waiting for the umbilical cord to be clamped, which may lead to serious health consequences. While our initial design does have the ability to change temperature at the command of the user, it is important to note that it may take a bit of time before the blanket cools off. In the case that the newborn does get too warm over the course of time in our primary design, then our modification to our design would be to remove the remote that allows for users to maintain and change temperature. Instead, we would opt for a microwavable blanket. This microwavable blanket will be heated for about thirty to 60 seconds several minutes prior to birth, giving the blanket enough time to cool down but still retain enough heat to keep the newborn warm once the process of delayed cord clamping begins. This will end up keeping costs low, since we subtracted the remote to regulate the temperature of the blanket. In addition, it is important to note that standard blankets are flammable, and will catch on fire if placed in a microwave. Our alternative blanket would be made of fiberglass (used in fire resistant blankets) instead of wool (used in standard blankets), making it safe to use in the microwave.