Academic Awards 2025 booklet

91 Materialising Futures for Perinatal Life Support Technology Perinatal Life Support (PLS) technology represents a future vision of life support technology that is being conducted in the field of extremely premature infant healthcare. Premature infants, born before 28 weeks, face serious health risks due to their underdeveloped organs. PLS incubators aim to mimic the womb more closely compared to air-based incubators and allow for continued organ maturation. After preterm birth, the infants would be kept submersed in fluid with their umbilical cords attached to an artificial placenta for oxygen and nutrients. Although animal studies have been conducted in this field, transitioning to human patient care presents significant challenges. As an unprecedented high-risk treatment, it requires a specialized medical team trained in new procedures and devices. Therefore, we developed a simulation environment including a data- driven anatomically realistic patient simulator to mimic physiological states and predict clinical outcomes. With this infant simulator we were able to co-design procedures and prototypes with clinicians and patient advocates. This thesis demonstrates and argues that simulation technology is a key enabler for the tangible realization of concepts that are clinically and technologically feasible and align with the values of parents, clinicians, and society. Early stakeholder engagement helps shape the technology; from clinical protocols and designs for parent-infant bonding, ultimately leading to patient-centered healthcare futures. Figure 1: Medical simulation with healthcare professionals to develop clinical procedures for transferring an infant from the mother’s womb to the PLS incubator after a preterm birth.