Belmont Medical Technologies, a medical device company that provides leading patient temperature management solutions, and ThermoAnalytics, a thermal software company, know a mother will do anything to protect their baby, including reducing their infant’s body temperature to a hypothermic level to keep them safe when necessary. 

While this may sound counterintuitive and borderline frightening, we’re honored to have partnered with both organizations in creating a human surrogate measurement device for testing infants undergoing therapeutic hypothermia. 

Keep reading to learn more about this one-of-a-kind Baby Thermal Manikin.

Developing the Baby Thermal Manikin

In medical device development, bench models that can simulate in-vivo research (research done on a living organism) are preferable as they reduce cost and variables and can be completed more quickly than in-vivo studies. Previously, developers of patient temperature management systems that incorporate warming and cooling garments did not have a bench model that could simulate in-vivo studies due to the complex nature of human thermal physiology – until now.

While traditional thermal medical devices typically control the patient’s core temperature during operating procedures or in intensive care, a smaller field of patient temperature management called therapeutic hypothermia (TH) has a growing interest, especially in neonates with moderate to severe hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE), a type of brain damage caused by a lack of oxygen before or shortly after birth.

By combining our Baby Thermal Manikin with ThermoAnalytics’ customized thermal software, we were able to create a thermal model to assist Belmont in its TH research.

Temperature management products are used to induce TH in neonates by reducing the core temperature as low as 33⁰C (91.4⁰F), which has shown to have therapeutic benefits on cardia and patients with brain injury [ 1 , 2 ]. For neonatal patients, TH improves survival and neurodevelopment in neonates [ 3 ].

During temperature management, it is critical to maintain temperature to deliver the correct therapy while cooling to therapeutic temperatures and rewarming to normothermic temperatures. The device is controlled by a human thermal model, and can simulate thermoregulation to predict core temperature – helping to more safely study the impacts of TH in infants.

So, whether you’re a medical device engineer, thermal scientist, or loving mother, we can all appreciate the impact the Baby Thermal Manikin will make on science, medicine, and our littlest loved ones.

1. Papile, Lu-Ann, Jill E. Baley, William Benitz, James Cummings, Waldemar A. Carlo, Eric Eichenwald, Praveen Kumar, Richard A. Polin, Rosemarie C. Tan, and Kasper S. Wang. "Hypothermia and neonatal encephalopathy." Pediatrics 133, no. 6 (2014): 1146-1150.

2. Holzer, Michael, Stephen A. Bernard, Said Hachimi-Idrissi, Risto O. Roine, Fritz Sterz, Marcus Müllner, and Collaborative Group on Induced Hypothermia for Neuroprotection After Cardiac Arrest. "Hypothermia for neuroprotection after cardiac arrest: systematic review and individual patient data meta-analysis." Critical care medicine 33, no. 2 (2005): 414-418.

3. Azzopardi, Denis, Brenda Strohm, Neil Marlow, Peter Brocklehurst, Aniko Deierl, Oya Eddama, Julia Goodwin et al. "Effects of hypothermia for perinatal asphyxia on childhood outcomes." New England Journal of Medicine 371, no. 2 (2014): 140-149.

How do you combat climate change and its impact on the human body in urban and desert environments? While we don’t quite have the answer yet, we are proud to say that our thermal manikin,ANDI, is helping researchers like Arizona State University’s (ASU) associate professor of mechanical engineering,Konrad Rykaczewski, find the answer. Konrad was kind enough to share how they’re using ANDI in their research, and we were thrilled to learn – just in time for Earth Day!

Thermetrics president Rick Burke recently visited Arizona State University (ASU) to drop off (and set up) the promising young man(ikin), dedicated to helping some of these brilliant minds conduct environmental research.

Thermetrics: Why did you choose ANDI for your research?

Konrad: One of the things ANDI enables over prior manikins is more accurate measurements of the heat transfer coefficient from the human body, basically measuring how much heat people lose to the surrounding air.

Usually, a manikin’s skin temperature is regulated to a fixed level above the environment temperature, and different labs measure at different temperatures. Those results feed into various models and predictions, which don’t always align.

Typically you measure how much heat the manikin loses to the environment. That includes convection and radiation exchange. The radiation exchange is difficult to account for, but if you do one experiment where you have cold air blowing over the manikin, and then the same experiment with hot air blowing over the manikin, you get a negative heat flux. From the difference between these two scenarios, you can find out what the radiation is, and you can directly account for it. No one has been able to do this before. With ANDI’s active cooling capability, this can enable measurement in a different way that hasn’t been done before, and could resolve measurement discrepancies.

Thermetrics: What are the benefits of being able to take ANDI outdoors, as opposed to only conducting research in a lab?

Konrad: If you’re going to design clothes for hot weather, it needs to move beyond just loose, lightweight clothing. With human heat transfer, details matter. If you understand how a person heats in hot conditions, you can try to find different ways to address that. Most other manikins don’t have internal cooling, so one of the things we can do on a hot summer day is set up an experiment with ANDI running in constant temperature mode and put different types of potential cooling clothing. For example, let’s say we focus on what hat is best to wear in the scorching sun. There are all these options ranging from hats that are reflective or cooled with ice packs or evaporation to maybe bit silly things like umbrella hats, and it’s not obvious what actually works, and in the lab it’s almost impossible to replicate near overhead solar radiation well. 

ANDI will help us identify a problem and determine how good or bad certain products are. Then, we can try and intelligently improve them. In regards to our basic measurements that correlate ANDI heating by different modes (convection, solar radiation, long wave radiation) to what is typically measured using state-of-the art weather stations, such information might ultimately help cities know which mechanisms to use in urban planning against the heat.

Want to learn more about ANDI?

From heat transfer to hats, we are excited to see the strides ANDI, Konrad, and the team at ASU make in urban planning against the heat. Learn more about ANDI’s work at ASU here.