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9 articles
Babies in neonatal intensive care wear sticky sensors and wires so that nurses can track their breathing around the clock, but those sensors can mark delicate skin and get in the way of cuddles. New research shows that a camera placed outside the incubator can count a premature baby's breaths to…
Four 2026 studies tested chatbot-style artificial intelligence on newborn care tasks: exam questions, parents' questions about home light treatment for jaundice, leaflets about home oxygen, and videos of heel-prick tests. The tools often did well, sometimes remarkably so, but some made worrying…
Almost every baby in a neonatal intensive care unit wears a small sensor with a glowing red light that measures how much oxygen is in the blood. After studies in adults suggested these monitors can overestimate oxygen levels in people with darker skin, researchers asked whether the same problem…
When a baby is admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit very sick or very premature, one of the first things the team does is place a soft catheter into a blood vessel in the umbilical cord stump. It is a painless way to give medicines, nutrition, and fluids, and to draw blood without repeated…
Researchers in Oaxaca, Mexico, tested a smartphone app that estimates a newborn's jaundice level from a photograph, comparing it with a laboratory blood test in 164 babies. The app was reasonably accurate for mild jaundice but tended to read too low when levels were high. A careful look at the baby…
Two research teams published studies in March 2026 testing whether artificial intelligence can identify the warning sign that tells doctors a premature baby's eye disease needs urgent treatment. Both systems performed well on the images they were trained with. Both stumbled when shown photographs…
Premature babies often need extra oxygen, but getting the amount exactly right is surprisingly hard, and both too little and too much can cause harm. A 2025 review by researchers in London gathered sixteen studies testing whether a computerised system that adjusts a baby's oxygen automatically does…
Artificial intelligence, or AI, is moving into newborn intensive care — not as a robot doctor, but as a set of helpers that can take notes, search the medical literature, and draft summaries. Some of these tools are genuinely useful today, one has strong evidence behind it, and others are still…
When a baby is born too early or too sick, the NICU becomes the centre of the family's world. And in that world, information is everything — but it does not always arrive in a form that helps.