People often use webcams to ensure nannies are doing their jobs right, or to make sure no one breaks into their house. But today, they’re doing a job that helps heartbroken parents keep hope in their hearts, when their newborns are in intensive care and they’re too far away to visit every day.
Bonding is critical for newborns in the newborn intensive care unit (NICU). Doctors suggest “kangaroo” care, where babies rest on their mother’s laps, and breast milk, to let the preemies know they’re there.
These babies need lots of touch but that’s not possible for some parents, who just can’t be in the NICU 24/7 hours, as most units allow.
Now instead of brief, or even long visiting hours, parents who can’t physically be with their babies can use webcam technology to log in to babycams in hospitals around the U.S. and several countries, and watch their babies around the clock.
There’s none of that skin-to-skin contact that’s so important for preemies, but parents can still see their newborns and talk or sing to them.
At UAMS in Little Rock, one of the first hospitals to do this, and at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, a speaker inside each incubator lets parents coo, talk and sing to their babies, according to a story by Janet Mcconnaughey.
In the U.K., staff found that they could use babycams to transmit images of a newborn baby to its mother’s bedside through the hospital’s intranet system, using ports at both beds.
At least eight domestic hospitals have installed such systems, and several dozen others are testing trial setups.
The systems aren't used by doctors and nurses for clinical care in the U.S. In some NICUs with babycams, people watching a baby can take screenshot "photographs," but the video is gone as soon as it's transmitted.
As doctors in Little Rock told Mcconnaughey, “webcam monitoring of newborns in intensive care is more than a feel-good gimmick in an age of instant communication.” The goal, instead, is to reduce certain problems that can occur when the babies go home by increasing bonding with parents.
A pilot study will compare bonding among parents who use the system frequently and those who use it less often. Another will see whether babies show a physical response, such as changed heart or breathing rates, to hearing their parents. Cameras are built into 21 of the hospital's 64 incubators.
Said Dr. Curtis Lowery, chairman of the OB-GYN department at UAMS, to Mcconnaughey: "This is not the same as being there but it's more like being there than talking to the nurse that's seeing and watching the baby,” Dr. Curtis Lowery, chairman of the OB-GYN department at UAMS, told Mcconnaughey.
Edited by
Braden Becker
