Collaborative Research: SCH: Movement as a Vital Sign in Preterm Infants

Each year in the United States, one in ten live births or roughly 380,000 babies are born prematurely, with a mortality of 27%. Nearly one third of those surviving suffer from lifelong neurological conditions including cerebral palsy, autism, and psychiatric disorders with substantial personal and societal costs. Despite advances in neonatal intensive care, little progress has been made in monitoring maturation of neurological function in preterm infants.

This proposal addresses an urgent need for continuous monitoring of neurological function in the neonatal intensive care unit to advance our understanding of normal and abnormal neurological maturation and to develop timely clinical interventions to improve the health outcomes and reduce costs of prematurity.

The research program aims to show that bodily movements of infants are a vital marker for the functional integrity of the nervous system. In Objective 1 the team will quantify movement bouts in routinely obtained data sets over ~3 months, from birth (