KangaGrow: A Smart Sling to Motivate Kangaroo Care

Overview

With support from a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Explorations grant, BEMPU developed KangaGrow — a low-cost, smart Kangaroo Care sling designed to motivate caregivers to practice more Kangaroo Care (KC), and to involve the whole family, not just the mother.

KangaGrow measures the amount of Kangaroo Care a baby receives using twelve capacitive touch points embedded in the fabric facing the baby's back, which detect skin-to-skin contact and log the duration. A central cluster of flowers blooms in color and circular light segments illuminate as KC time accumulates — giving caregivers an emotionally engaging, real-time visual reward for continuing skin-to-skin care.

BEMPU's engineering team spent approximately 6 months designing the system using human-centered design, iterating through several sensor technologies before settling on the 12-point capacitive touch design. Bench testing with 5 adults found KangaGrow to be 95% accurate in measuring actual Kangaroo Care time.

A pilot usability study at Niloufer Hospital, Hyderabad enrolled 15 mother-baby dyads, who practiced KMC with KangaGrow under staff supervision. Doctors and nurses found it a useful tool for reinforcing KMC practice, and mothers were excited by the responsive visual display — though many, especially from lower-resource and lower-education backgrounds, were hesitant to place electronics near their babies, a barrier BEMPU's team suggests could be addressed in future studies with urban or higher-socioeconomic populations.

The invention resulted in a granted U.S. patent — US 10,893,757 B2, "Kangaroo Care Wearable Device" — with inventors Mona Sharma, Vidisha Agarwal, and Ratul Narain, assigned to BEMPU Health.

Results Achieved

Project Activities

• Human-centered design and engineering of the KangaGrow embedded sensor system (~6 months)
• Bench testing for KC-time measurement accuracy with 5 adult volunteers
• Pilot usability and acceptability study with 15 mother-baby dyads at Niloufer Hospital, Hyderabad
• Structured Likert-scale feedback collection from mothers, doctors, and nurses
• U.S. patent filed and granted for the KangaGrow / Kangaroo Care Wearable Device design

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