NeoVault: empowering neonatal research through a neonate data hub

Area of Science:

• Neonatal research
• Data science in healthcare
• Infant physiology

Background:

• Early postnatal stability in preterm infants is crucial for better outcomes.
• Current neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) monitoring lacks comprehensive physiological and movement data.
• Neonatal data is currently fragmented across scattered sources without a centralized repository.

Purpose of the Study:

• To establish the first centralized data hub for neonatal information.
• To provide researchers, data scientists, medical personnel, and developers with easy access to neonatal data.
• To facilitate the integration of neonatal data into third-party applications.

Main Methods:

• Development of NEOVAULT, a novel neonate data hub.
• Implementation of two access interfaces: a Web interface for users and a RESTful API for developers.
• Data collection via the Neonates Recording Platform (NRP) tool for automatic and reliable physiological and postural data acquisition.

Main Results:

• NEOVAULT offers interactive access to upload or download postural, physiological, and medical data.
• The platform includes a Web interface with search, filtering, visualization, and CSV dataset generation capabilities.
• A RESTful API, described in OpenAPI, allows interoperable data access from any device, currently holding ~800,000 postural and 3,000 physiological records.

Conclusions:

• NEOVAULT serves as an open platform for accessible neonatal data.
• The hub supports diverse users including researchers, data scientists, medical staff, and programmers.
• It enables seamless integration into external applications and custom dataset creation.