Screening Newborns for Jaundice Using Smartphone Cameras

There seems to be a smartphone app for just about everything these days, so why not jaundice? Three of five newborns will experience jaundice, which is the yellowing of the skin due to increased bilirubin levels in the body. Left untreated, severe jaundice can cause brain damage or hearing loss.

Typically, parents must bring their babies back to the hospital shortly after birth for a blood draw prick that estimates bilirubin levels in newborns.

Intermountain Health and Picterus AS, a Norwegian health technology company, aim to make such trips unnecessary by building an application using the smartphone’s camera that can determine bilirubin levels in infants accurately at home.

The app and technology include a laminated calibration card that is placed on the chest of the baby. About six pictures are taken of the card and the baby, automatically loaded onto a server, evaluated, and then sent back to the phone with measurements.

Developers say the goal of the trial study is to find an inexpensive, bloodless and painless way to measure bilirubin levels in babies without the cost and inconvenience of taking them to the clinic and to the lab.

Intermountain researchers will study the app on about 300 term babies. Tim Bahr, M.D., an Intermountain Health neonatologist, believes if the new app and related technology work as designed, families will enthusiastically embrace it.

“We do know that parents are pretty good at taking pictures of their babies,” he says.