Health technology meets fashion: LSU researchers create temperature-monitoring hats for babies

BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) – Infancy is one of the most vulnerable times for a baby, so researchers at LSU are stitching up a way to know your baby’s vital signs instantly.

In 2022, nearly half of all deaths in children under 5 years old happened within the first 28 days of life, according to the World Health Organization.

“I had a lot of stress being a new parent,” Dr. Sibei Xia said.

Dr. Xia knows the worries that come with being a mother of a newborn all too well. Two years ago, she started weaving that experience into her work.

“I came across this yarn and said okay, that would be a brilliant idea that I don’t have to check in that often and it can just give me the direct signals,” Dr. Xia said.

Dr. Xia and a team of researchers at LSU discovered smart yarn- a special type of yarn that can instantly detect when the temperature reaches a certain threshold.

“The molecular will realign to show different colors at different temperatures,” Dr. Xia said.

By sewing the yarn into little hats, it becomes a wearable temperature monitor for babies, letting their mothers know if they have a fever within a matter of seconds.

“It’s roughly stiff and it’s thick, and it’s not as comfortable if you want to put this on baby it might irritate their skin, so what we do is that we combine it with 100% cotton yarn and then we knit it in a structure so that the color will be showing up on one side and the other side is more the soft side of the cotton,” Dr. Xia said.

The purple smart yarn turns into a light beige when the temperature threshold is met.

Dr. Xia says researchers on the team are still doing tests and looking into different types of yarns and styles. Once the temperature monitoring infant hats are commercialized, she hopes it’ll take one more worry off a mother’s mind.

“It gives me a peace of mind to just know whether he is good or not without having to actually touch him, or being a non-invasive way of monitoring his body temperature,” Dr. Xia said.

After receiving feedback from mothers through the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program, the research team is also considering developing other products, like blankets and onesies, as well as using different types of yarn that can measure heartbeat, respiration, and oxygen levels.

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