Skin to skin, at last: a wearable 'skincubator' lets a Houston dad hold his fragile twins

For almost two weeks, Dorian Ojemen and his wife Tiffany could only touch their newborn twins, Silas and Simone, through the portholes of their incubators at Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston — the twins arrived on August 7 at just 26 weeks. Then the NICU team offered them a Skincubator: a wearable incubator that keeps a fragile baby warm, humidified and connected to monitors while resting on a parent's chest. Dorian became the first father in Texas to hold his babies skin-to-skin this way. “I was just very nervous because they're very small,” he said. “When I heard there's an easy way to have them close to me, I was excited.” The hospital is the first in the USA to trial the device, which helps the babies regulate their heartbeats and lets parents finally do the most natural thing in the world.

SDG 3 · Good health and well-being — Mechanism: tech innovation