Funding outcome

Every year, about 10 million babies are born with breathing problems and need immediate help to breathe properly. Without the appropriate help, these babies face a huge risk of having a serious brain injury or even dying. Resuscitation is the only way for clinical teams to give babies the help they need to survive. Resuscitation is a series of steps with the ultimate goal of saving the baby's life. The most important part of a successful resuscitation is the order and timing of these steps. Heart rate is the only way to know about the baby's condition and guide these steps. Because of this, it is extremely important to be able to check heart rate correctly and quickly. Current guidelines for resuscitating newborn babies recommend using a stethoscope, pulse oximeter, or an electrocardiogram for heart rate assessment Stethoscopes can be slow, difficult to hear from and give an incorrect heart rate. Pulse oximeters and electrocardiograms are also slow, but provide a good heart rate signal. Slow or incorrect assessment of the heart rate during resuscitation increases risk of brain injury and death in the baby. This project is translational, which means it will involve working with an animal model and humans. The first part of this project focuses on finding and evaluating new ways to check heart rate and changes in heart rate more correctly and quickly. Our lab uses the animal model of newborn piglets, which mimics real life events that happen in newborn babies with breathing problems. We plan to test new technologies, like the digital stethoscope and a smartphone app, to check heart rate in these newborn piglets. The digital stethoscope uses electronics to give a clearer sound when checking heart rate and the smartphone app calculates heart rate by having a user tap on a phone screen for every heartbeat they hear. We are able to track the true heart rate in the piglets by putting a special probe inside them. This will give us a way to check how closely the new technologies compare to the true heart rate. We will also compare how fast and reliable these technologies are to current recommended methods. The next part of this project will evaluate these new technologies in newborn human babies who have breathing problems. We will compare these new technologies to current recommendations using clinical trials. First, we will compare the accuracy of digital stethoscopes to stethoscopes. Electrocardiogram and pulse oximetry will be used to track the true heart rate in this trial. Second, we plan to look at the time needed to check heart rate to see which technologies are the fastest. By evaluating these technologies in babies who need help, we may be only a heartbeat away from better and safer resuscitations to save many babies for generations to come.