Tiny ears need extra protection...and extra TLC. Premature babies often spend their first days in a hospital's neonatal intensive care unit, full of breathing machines beeping, pages coming over the loudspeaker, doors opening and closing, and other bothersome noises. It's a far cry from the cozy, muffled environment of the uterus, which keeps full-term babies from too-loud sounds.
Without the protection of the uterine lining, babies whose brains and bodies are weeks from developing to the level of a full-term newborn, are exposed to sounds that are medically too loud. Beeps and alarms alone in the hospital measure at roughly 2,000 Hertz; that's four times the level of noise fetuses in the womb hear (500 Hertz), according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Ventilators can emit sounds up to 8,000 Hertz. And while some outside noises are muffled for babies in incubators, others, like CPAP machines and other devices inside the incubator, are magnified.
This noise, and the stress it directly induces, can cause a host of problems for preemies: Their heart rates are higher, they sleep poorly, they don't eat as much, and they have higher rates of language delays.
How to solve this pervasive and persistent problem? Enter a small but high-tech beanie.
