Our paper “Joey: Supporting Kangaroo Mother Care with Computational Fabrics” has been accepted for publication in ACM MobiSys 2024 and received the Best Paper Award and People’s Choice Demo Award!
This project centers on Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC), a method involving direct skin-to-skin contact between an infant and a caregiver. KMC is recognized for its significant benefits, supporting both preterm and full-term infants’ health and development. We proposed “Joey,” a soft fabric necklace worn by the caregiver to monitor the KMC practice. It leverages the transmission of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals across individuals during skin-to-skin contact. With a minimalist fabric sensor structure, Joey measures KMC duration via the presence of mixed ECG signals. It then isolates the infant’s ECG from this mixture with a proposed signal extraction algorithm and employs a diffusion-based denoising model to mitigate motion artifacts, enabling reliable inference of the infant’s vital signs. Unlike traditional manual monitoring of the KMC process, Joey is the first wearable system capable of simultaneously monitoring KMC duration, infant’s heart, and respiration rate, while maintaining comfort.
Congratulations to Qijia Shao, Emily Bejerano, Jingping Nie, and the rest of the team!
This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (IIS-2202553) and COGNISENSE, one of seven centers in JUMP 2.0, a Semiconductor Research Corporation program sponsored by DARPA. The authors would like to thank Neetika Ashwani for bringing the problem of KMC monitoring to them. The authors declare no financial or other conflicts of interest.
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