Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Neonatal Nursing journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jnn Original Article Development of a neonatal incubator with phototherapy, biometric fingerprint reader, remote monitoring, and heart rate control adapted for developing countries hospitals Pascalin Tiam Kapen a,b,* , Youssoufa Mohamadou a , Foutse Momo a , Dongmeza Koudjou Jauspin a , Nenkam Kanmagne a , Dongmeza Dongmo Jordan a a Université des Montagnes, ISST, P.O. Box 208, Bangangté, Cameroon b University of Dschang, LISIE/L2MSP, P.O. Box 134, Bangangté, Cameroon ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Low-cost automatic neonatal incubator Phototherapy Video surveillance Remote monitoring Heart rate control Biometric fingerprint reader Heat transfer ABSTRACT This paper aims to develop an automatic neonatal incubator equipped with phototherapy, biometric fingerprint reader, remote monitoring and heart rate control modules for developing countries due to the lack of neonatal incubators. The proposed device consists of an acquisition module that senses temperatures (of the enclosure and the baby) and humidity, a biometric fingerprint reader to identify the user, a remote monitoring module in charge of supervising the temperature and the heart rate of the baby, a video surveillance module which allows filming and transmitting the images to the web server in order to give parents and nurses the possibility of being able to visualize whatever their location the newborn baby, a phototherapy module used to treat newborn jaundice by lowering the bilirubin levels in the baby's blood, a digital control module from a pulse width modulation (PWM) signal generated by a microcontroller of Arduino Nano type for system operation monitoring, and a human machine interface module for setting parameters. The equations describing the energy balance and heat transfer for newborn baby (Ostrowski and Rojczyk, 2018) are taken into account for the implementation of power supply and the choice of the heating resistor. The desired temperature of 37 °C was obtained after only a few minutes inside the incubator. 1. Introduction Over 130 million babies are born every year in the world, and al- most 8 million die before their first birthday due to prematurity com- plications (World Health Organization, 2006). One of the complications is improper thermoregulation which is generally due to the lack of equipment dedicated to this (Osifo and Oriaifo, 2008). Furthermore, it can be noted the lack of finance and skilled personnel for such equip- ment maintenance in third world countries (Richards- Kortum, 2010). All these factors constitute the causes of neonatal deaths (Word, 2009; Mah-Mungyeh et al., 2014). Therefore, many attempts to develop neonatal incubators have been performed in the literature (Suruthi and Suma, 2015; Tisa et al., 2013; Tran et al., 2014; Sreenath, Kumar, Lohit; Pinto et al., 2015), however the equipment were either highly power consuming or took a long time to reach the target temperature. Re- cently, a prototype of incubator was designed (Kapen et al., 2018). However, it does not allow supervising physiological parameters of the baby. In this work, an incubator with phototherapy, biometric fingerprint reader, video surveillance, remote monitoring and heart rate control modules adapted for third world countries health centers is constructed. Energy balance and heat transfer for newborn baby (Ostrowski and Rojczyk, 2018) were considered for the implementation of power supply and the choice of the heating resistor. 2. Material and methods 2.1. Mathematical background of heat transfer for newborn baby The various types of heat transfer for newborn baby are: Convective, conductive, radiative and evaporative (Fig. 1). 2.1.1. Conductive heat transfer This type of heat exchange may be occurred between the newborn and the material on which he is placed. In this work, a 6 cm-thick foam mattress of polyether type has been used for its excellent insulating properties. Therefore, the conductive heat transfer for newborn baby https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnn.2019.07.011 Received 27 March 2019; Accepted 2 July 2019 * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: ptiam@udm.aed-cm.org, fpascalin20022003@gmail.com (P.T. Kapen). Journal of Neonatal Nursing xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 1355-1841/ © 2019 Neonatal Nurses Association. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Pascalin Tiam Kapen, et al., Journal of Neonatal Nursing, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnn.2019.07.011