Portable Infant Phototherapy

This project was the main focus of my work at Little Sparrows Technologies, a startup led by two doctors. The bili·hut is a portable medical device that treats neonatal jaundice compactly and rapidly. This allows infants to remain at their mother’s bedside in the postpartum room, eliminating the need to transfer them to the NICU. The bili·hut is able to completely treat most infants by around 12 hours, whereas other jaundice therapy devices take more than twice as long. This dramatically shortens hospital stays and lowers costs.

Over five years, as the sole electrical engineer on a four-person team, I developed the electrical system within the bili·hut from proof-of-concept through final design, FDA clearance, and pilot production. The final product delivers its best-in-class jaundice therapy using only 10 watts of power, while providing a host of electrical features including battery-operability, light-intensity calibration, treatment timekeeping, temperature monitoring, and visual alarms. All electronics were kept to a compact and thin profile, enclosed inconspicuously within the fabric shell of the device.