Carle Illinois College of Medicine students have designed a new infant wrapping system that could save the lives of newborns whose brains don’t get enough oxygen during birth, especially those born in low-resource settings. The system uses proven controlled cooling technology to reduce the risk of death and long-term disability in babies born with hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (HIE). The innovation is intended to bridge a care gap in low- and middle-income countries where more expensive infant cooling systems aren’t available.
In locations where advanced health care is readily available, brain injury from lack of oxygen during birth is relatively rare; it is much more common in countries where resources are scarce, claiming the lives of 10 to 60 percent of the babies affected. About 40 percent of the babies who survive have impaired development of the brain and nervous system.
Therapeutic hypothermia – controlled cooling of the infant’s brain and body – is often used to reduce further injury and help protect the brain from the effects of reduced oxygen flow. The technique is most effective when used in the first several hours of life, but it isn’t available in all labor and delivery settings.
CI MED students Mahima Goel, Maxine Arnush, and Modan Goldman say their team’s new system, called WrapCool, is a first-of-its-kind, hypothermia wrap and cap designed for newborns in hospitals where traditional cooling systems aren’t available.
“Our device is specifically engineered as a self-regulating temperature system with a price point that is less than half its market competitors, thereby making it well-suited to be used during transport and in low-resource communities that are not tertiary neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) centers,” team leader Goel said.
Current infant cooling systems often cost over $30,000 per unit and require continuous manual adjustments to avoid over- or under-cooling. The WrapCool prototype includes an automated monitoring unit that controls the amount of coolant deployed into the one-size-fits-all wrap.
WrapCool is one of the 2026 Capstone Innovations developed by CI MED students in collaboration with cross-disciplinary teams made up of engineers from The Grainger College of Engineering and MBA students from the Gies College of Business to design a solution to a health care challenge. The team includes Gies College of Business MBA candidates Disha Gokani and Shannon Mareth; Bioengineering Master’s degree candidates Amelia Lin and Emilio Zheng Han Lim; and Undergraduate bioengineering students Anya Maheshwari, Taylor Jones, Thea Bueno, Peter Nardulli, James Edmunds, and Gwen Puntratanamongkol.