Many newborns turn yellow in the first few days. It is what is known as physiological jaundice, which appears within a few days and usually disappears by two weeks, leaving progressively. That yellow color in the skin is given by high levels of bilirubin in the blood.
Bilirubin is produced when old red blood cells are replaced. The liver helps to break it down to eliminate it in the stool, but at first this function is not very purified and is not always enough, putting on the yellow baby. The normal thing is that day by day that color goes away. However, sometimes it doesn't go away, or sometimes it even increases, being dangerous for the baby. To find out what bilirubin levels are and to detect jaundice, James Taylor, a pediatrician at the University of Seattle has invented "BiliCam", a mobile application that tells us at the moment how the baby is doing.
Dangerous for the baby?
So is. Very high levels of bilirubin can cause brain damage and even death. But this does not usually happen because jaundice is treated before the levels become so high (parents see the baby so yellow that they take him to the hospital).
How the application works
The function of this application is to analyze the baby's skin color and give us an approximate result of bilirubin levels. You don't need any accessories, cables or anything like that, as it is done with the same camera on the phone. The only thing is that, as the light conditions and the quality of each camera is very different, to make it reliable, you have to put a color calibration card, thanks to which the application can make the comparison between skin color, card colors and skin types that have already been studied.
To give the application a range of skin colors with references to different levels of bilirubin, about 100 babies have been studied who have been analyzing the color of their skin in reference to the bilirubin levels of each moment.
Thanks to this application, when in doubt, we can know if our baby has high bilirubin and, what is more important, we can see how it evolves over the days.
Is it reliable?
The application is not yet available, as they are still researching with more children to make it more reliable, but the results of the study they have presented are quite promising. Without need of a puncture, transfer to the hospital or any discomfort for the baby, we can know instantly how it is. In case of false positive or false negative (if you give us values that do not seem to be consistent with the skin color), we can always do the test again, as many times as we want, because it all comes down to taking a picture of the baby.
Now we just need to finish the development of "BiliCam" and that is made available to fathers and mothers, because it will allow us very easily, simply and without any discomfort for the baby, to know what the bilirubin levels are, and that, in a hospital, is much more annoying for the baby.
