Neonatal Incubator

An enclosed, temperature and humidity controlled bassinet built to keep a premature or medically fragile newborn warm and protected while its own ability to regulate body heat and fight infection is still immature. The device traces to designs first built for hospital nurseries in France in the 1880s, modeled loosely on incubators used for hatching poultry eggs, and was popularized partly through public exhibitions that displayed premature infants in incubators at fairs and expositions as a way of demonstrating the technology and raising money for its use. A modern incubator combines a heated, filtered air supply, humidity control, and often built in monitoring for the infant's temperature, heart rate, and oxygen level, with access ports that let caregivers reach in to feed, examine, or handle the infant without removing it from its controlled environment. The incubator, together with related advances in neonatal feeding and respiratory support, is credited with a substantial share of the twentieth century's improvement in survival rates for infants born early or at low birth weight.