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Wireless Heart Sensor for Capturing Cardiac Orienting Response for Prediction of Neurodevelopmental Delay in Infants
Marcelo Aguilar-Rivera1, Julie A Kable2, Lyubov Yevtushok3,4
1Department of Bioengineering, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.
Insights
A new portable wireless system can accurately measure cardiac orienting responses (CORs) in infants. This technology offers a cost-effective, scalable method for early detection of neurodevelopmental delays, enabling timely interventions.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Pediatrics
- Neuroscience
- Biomedical Engineering
Background:
- Early identification of neurodevelopmental delay is crucial for timely interventions, leveraging infant brain plasticity.
- Standardized physiological tests like cardiac orienting responses (CORs) show promise for early detection.
- Traditional CORs assessment uses bulky equipment, limiting widespread clinical use.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop a portable, wireless system for capturing cardiac orienting responses (CORs) in infants.
- To assess the feasibility and accuracy of this system for early neurodevelopmental screening.
- To establish a cost-effective and scalable method for identifying infants at risk.
Main Methods:
- Development of a portable wireless electrocardiogram (ECG) sensor.
- Creation of a custom iOS application for stimulus presentation and data recording.
- Validation of the system's ability to capture accurate CORs from infants in response to auditory and visual stimuli.
Main Results:
- The wireless ECG system and mobile application successfully captured infant CORs.
- The system demonstrated sufficient physiologic and timing accuracy for well-characterized ECG responses.
- The approach is suitable for capturing CORs in infants, paving the way for further validation.
Conclusions:
- A portable wireless heartbeat sensor and mobile app system can effectively capture infant CORs.
- This technology represents a significant step towards cost-effective, scalable, and standardized early screening for neurodevelopmental delays.
- Mobile-based COR monitoring offers a promising avenue for early recognition and intervention in at-risk infants.
Abstract:
Early identification of infants at risk of neurodevelopmental delay is an essential public health aim. Such a diagnosis allows early interventions for infants that maximally take advantage of the neural plasticity in the developing brain. Using standardized physiological developmental tests, such as the assessment of neurophysiological response to environmental events using cardiac orienting responses (CORs), is a promising and effective approach for early recognition of neurodevelopmental delay. Previous CORs have been collected on children using large bulky equipment that would not be feasible for widespread screening in routine clinical visits. We developed a portable wireless electrocardiogram (ECG) system along with a custom application for IOS tablets that, in tandem, can extract CORs with sufficient physiologic and timing accuracy to reflect the well-characterized ECG response to both auditory and visual stimuli. The sensor described here serves as an initial step in determining the extent to which COR tools are cost-effective for the early screening of children to determine who is at risk of developing neurocognitive deficits and may benefit from early interventions. We demonstrated that our approach, based on a wireless heartbeat sensor system and a custom mobile application for stimulus display and data recording, is sufficient to capture CORs from infants. The COR monitoring approach described here with mobile technology is an example of a desired standardized physiologic assessment that is a cost-and-time efficient, scalable method for early recognition of neurodevelopmental delay.
