2026 · Health tech · Neonatal care
Infantinel
Client: Mechabits
AI-powered wearable IoT for newborn health — continuous vitals on-device, early-warning alerts on the caregiver’s phone, engineered for low-resource clinics.
Overview
Every day, around 675 newborns die in Pakistan. Many of those deaths follow conditions that are treatable when caught early — jaundice, infection, low oxygen, unstable body temperature. The equipment that detects them often sits inside hospital NICUs, and gold-standard vital-signs monitors are priced far beyond the reach of most clinics in low-resource settings. Around 60% of full-term newborns develop jaundice in their first week, yet severe cases occur in Southeast Asia at roughly 75 times the rate reported in Europe — largely because screening never reaches them. Infantinel is Mechabits’ answer to that gap: a soft wearable sock-mounted device that continuously tracks a newborn’s vitals, analyses signals on the ESP32-S3 itself, and alerts caregivers on their phone over Wi-Fi — with a parts cost under USD 30. It helps flag early signs of neonatal jaundice, irregular heart rate, infection, low blood oxygen, fever and hypothermia, and unsafe room conditions — engineering built for the conditions it is actually used in.
Challenge
Early warning for treatable newborn conditions depends on hospital-grade monitors most clinics cannot afford — so screening never reaches the babies who need it most.
Solution
A soft wearable IoT device on ESP32-S3 with medical-grade sensors, on-device analysis, and live Wi-Fi alerts to a caregiver phone — designed for continuous neonatal monitoring at a parts cost under USD 30.
Results
- Wearable neonatal monitor targeting early signs of jaundice, infection, hypoxia, and temperature instability
- On-device analysis plus live caregiver alerts over Wi-Fi
- Parts cost under USD 30 — built for low-resource clinical settings