Advanced signal processing algorithms for cardiorespiratory monitoring in the neonatal intensive care unit

This chapter provides basic principles aimed at understanding advanced engineering and mathematical methods that could potentially provide effective assisting technology in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The included material by no means represents a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art in the field, but purposely travels along a very narrow line in order to offer the reader a specific pathway needed to understand some of the main conceptual and practical steps to be considered from a biomedical engineering point of view. The chapter is organized in compact paragraphs aimed at threading lines guiding the reader through a narrowly selected bibliographic body of knowledge. The selected material is divided in four sections. The first three sections concisely outline the three main research lines and connect the reader to Clinical, Physiological, and Methodological Background respectively. The last fourth section provides a methodological outline of a specific exemplary approach based on a physiological model of heartbeat dynamics defined by using the statistical theory of point processes.