Abstrait

Design and Development of an Inexpensive Temperature Controller for an Infant Incubator

P. Jagadeesh, G. Karthick Kumar Reddy, S. Venkatramana Reddy

Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) is used for better temperature measurement, isolation from infection, specialized feeding to infants and to prevent hypothermia and hyperthermia. The NICU or incubator consists of a servo control system including temperature sensor to regulate incubator air temperature. Among the number of temperature sensors like thermocouples, thermistors, Mercury thermometers, digital temperature sensor (DTS), etc, DTS gives accurate results over analog temperature sensors. The objective of the work is to interface Programmable ADT7410 DTS to PIC18F8720 Microcontroller to monitor the infants body temperature. This sensor measures temperature with accuracy, high resolution and fast conversion. ADT7410 is a MEM based digital sensor, which is Programmable for High, Low and critical temperature limits. It also includes on-chip oscillator, Sigma-Delta modulator, temperature registers and interrupt pins. PIC microcontroller is used as core of servo control system to read and write temperature from sensor using I2C protocol, and to control peripherals like radiant warmer, buzzer, Relays and display the result on LCD monitor. The software program is written in C language and compiled to generate Hex file. The step by step process of the system is explained using flowchart