Monitoring the heat balance of a baby and controlling an incubator

摘要

For controlling the operational parameters influencing the heat balance of a baby (3) in an incubator (1), temperature sensors are provided for the measurement of at least two of body internal temperature (5), skin temperature (6), body peripheral temperature (7) and ambient temperature (4). The sensor outputs are supplied to a data processing unit (10), which contains a first multi-dimensional table (13) providing empirical values determined from specialist knowledge in dependence on sensor type and person-related variables. A comparison unit (15) compares actual sensor values (11) with values (14) from the table (13) and the differences (16) are compared at (18) with tolerances from further table (17) to provide warning (18) and display (19) when the tolerances are exceeded.