A measurement procedure for the assessment of thermoregulatory activitity in premature babies

Many important vital signs need to be measured on preterm patients when they are recovered in intensive care units: cardiac rate, respiration activity, blood saturation, temperature. The later is, in particular, a key quantity to assess when the aim is to verify if the patient has fully developed the capacity to regulate his/her temperature. Presently, the procedure followed by clinicians is based on a subjective test, which sees the heating system of the curl switched off; if the central temperature of the patient will not be reduced below 35°C in the following two hours, the patient is considered able to thermoregulate himself. The aim of this paper is to propose a measurement procedure aiming to verify if the patient has the ability to autonomously thermoregulate. The procedure is based on the use of a multipoint (up to 16 sensing points), measurement system of the superficial temperature, that can assess the patient temperature (on 6 sites) and the surrounding temperature (inside and outside the crib), while the heating system is switched off. In this paper, 48 premature patients (mean gestation age 34 week and mean weight 1791 g) have been tested. Results demonstrate that from the measured data, it is possible to correctly identify patients with an adequate thermoregulation capacity (sensitivity of 0.81 and specificity of 0.89) and with a rapid procedure (< 5 min).