Telebaby®: Live Video Streaming from a Neonatal Ward Using the Internet

New information technologies can be efficiently used to fill in the gaps in the human need of communication during the difficult time of hospitalization. The Telebaby® project was designed and supported by the University Medical Centre Utrecht. Telebaby® links parents from home to their newborn receiving intensive, high or medium care. The monitoring of the login behavior of the parents has shown that standard Internet technology for distributing multimedia allows parents to virtually “visit” their baby more often. The preliminary results indicate that Telebaby® offers the parents the feeling of control and principally reduced the state of anxiety associated to the mother-child separation. A simple system like Telebaby® was easily adopted by the parents and has proven to be an efficient concept. Implementing Telebaby® in a hospital environment proved to be a real challenge.