Project Motivation: Reports show that family caregivers encompass more than one in five Americans. When the patient is a child, the child’s close family and parents become caregivers and critical stakeholders in ensuring a hospitalized child’s long-term recovery. Still, parents report feeling left out of the caregiving process and present dissatisfaction about communication with their child’s providers. In addition, during the hospital stay, parents are subject to a variety of stresses which can adversely impact the parent-infant bonding and lead to worse health outcomes for the infant. 

Kangaroo care (KC) can promote bonding and attachment between the parent-child dyad in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). In order to help strengthen the dyadic parent-infant relationship and facilitate greater use of attachment promoting behaviors like KC in NICUs, it is important to be able to monitor those behaviors in a HIPPA compliant and non-intrusive way, and to determine how the behavior’s duration and frequency relate to positive interactions for the parent-child dyad.

Project Collaborators:

• Dr. Abigail Clarke-Sather

• Dr. Sonya Wang

What we've done

Lead Student: Harika Yarlagadda

This project has two specific aims: 

1. Develop a healthcare monitoring system. By developing a remote healthcare monitoring system, we aim to identify and establish the viability of a HIPPA-compliant, non-intrusive patient’s monitoring system to support health-related research regarding monitoring behaviors of the patient-caregiver dyadic.

2. Proof of concept: vital signs collection and usability feedback. By tracking parent-infant vital signs response (i.e., heart rate and heart rate synchrony) relative to duration and frequency of the parent-child attachment behaviors and collecting parents’ and health professionals’ feedback, we aim to determine factors to support attachment such as the effective ways to facilitate use of KC in the NICU, the optimal frequency and duration associated with those behaviors between the parent-child in the NICU to improve multiple caregivers interactions and the parent-child dyad health outcomes.

Project Outcome

We have finalized Aim 1 and 2 by developing and conducting a proof of concept experiment. Results  have been published on research conferences.

1. Initial comparison of vital signs monitoring on the wrist with the ankle and bicep. Sam Carlson, Farhanuddin Fazaluddin Kazi, Abigail R Clarke-Sather, Jomara Sandbulte, Sonya Wang - Frontiers in Biomedical Devices, 2023

2. Supporting Parent-Child Bonding and Attachment Practices in the NICU: Designing and Evaluating a Non-Intrusive Health Monitoring Solution. Harika Yarlagadda, Jomara Sandbulte,  Abigail Clarke-Sather - 25th International Conference on Engineering Design - ICED 2025

3. Design of a Non-Intrusive Health Monitoring System to Facilitate Parent-Child Interactions during Hospitalization. Harika Yarlagadda, Jomara Sandbulte,  Abigail Clarke-Sather, Sonya Wang. Proceedings of the 2025 Design of Medical Devices Conference - DMD2025

4. Challenges and Enhancement of Health: A Dual impact of Kangaroo Care on Parents and Infants - Systematic Review. Harika Yarlagadda, Jomara Sandbulte, and Edward Downs - mHealth Journal

5. The Dual Impact of Remote Health Monitoring on Caregiver Stress and Well-being: A Systematic Review. Harika Yarlagadda, Jomara Sandbulte, and Abigail Clarke-Sather - under review at JMIR Journal