DESIGN A LOW COST NEONATAL INCUBATOR

Babies born prematurely are generally kept in special chambers referred to as "incubators", which are enclosures with controlled temperature and humidity.Some newborn babies at the full term also need to be placed in the incubators for special treatment purposes.Since the introduction of neonatal incubators, the survival rate of premature births and newborns has increased significantly, making the incubators extremely important devices in neonatal care at hospitals.Modern incubators are very expensive making it difficult for hospitals, especially small ones, to procure them especially with economic crunch and resource constraints for capital equipment.The paper provides the details of a students' project to design and build an efficient and cost-effective incubator to meet the clinical needs at low budget hospitals.The design involves controlling the temperature precisely within a small physiological range, while concurrently maintaining the desired humidity.The incubator is also designed to trigger alarms in the event of failures of electromechanical nature.It is noted that the project is carried out as a part of the requirements for the Thermal Design course in the Electromechanical Engineering program.