The small, high-tech beanie protecting premature babies
The Sonura Beanie, designed by Penn Engineering alums, is calming babies in the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania’s intensive care nursery.
2 min. read
Tiny ears need extra protection ... and extra TLC. Premature babies often spend their first days in a hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, full of breathing machines beeping, pages coming over the loudspeaker, doors opening and closing, and other bothersome noises. It’s a far cry from the cozy, muffled environment of the uterus, which keeps full-term babies from too-loud sounds.
Without the protection of the uterine lining, babies whose brains and bodies are weeks from developing to the level of a full-term newborn, are exposed to sounds that are medically too loud. Beeps and alarms alone in the hospital measure at roughly 2,000 Hertz; that’s four times the level of noise fetuses in the womb hear (500 Hertz), according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Ventilators can emit sounds up to 8,000 Hertz. And while some outside noises are muffled for babies in incubators, others, like CPAP machines and other devices inside the incubator, are magnified.
This noise, and the stress it directly induces, can cause a host of problems for preemies: Their heart rates are higher, they sleep poorly, they don’t eat as much, and they have higher rates of language delays.
How to solve this pervasive and persistent problem? Enter a small but high-tech beanie.
Pamela Collins holds her son, John, who is wearing the Sonura Beanie.
(Image: Courtesy of Penn Medicine News)
Sophie Ishiwari and Gabby Daltoso, two 2025 graduates of Penn‘s School of Engineering and Applied Science, created a hat for premature babies which blocks out high-frequency sounds and can also play messages from their parents. They named the device the Sonura Beanie, with “sonura” coming from the Latin word for sound. Any audio the beanie plays goes through an audio filter that blocks high frequencies, which brings it under the 500-Hertz threshold, in line with what babies can safely hear. For their innovative idea, field-tested at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP), the two earned the President’s Innovation Prize in 2023.
“Gabby and I spent a lot of time shadowing and talking to nurses, clinicians, and staff in the Intensive Care Nursery at HUP as well as parents to develop something that could make a true difference,” says Ishiwari. “We received input from hundreds of people.”
“What stuck out to us was the fragility of these babies and the moms, dads, and care providers all striving to bring the babies to a healthy place,” says Daltoso. “We wanted to help.”
Ishiwari and Daltoso took a sound-engineering class to master the creation of a device that filters out loud and intrusive sounds. They then designed a beanie with super-soft speakers sewed inside ear flaps. The beanie connects to an app to play the mothers’ heartbeat and recorded audio (parents singing lullabies, reading stories, etc.) and to adjust the level of sound the baby hears; as the baby ages and develops to the level of a full-term infant, the frequency played can be raised to resemble more common sound levels outside the womb. The beanie itself is also adjustable to fit small but growing heads and accommodates wires and tubes used for breathing and feeding, which was very important to intensive care nursery nurses.
“We’ve been told jokingly that the beanie is so soft and cozy that we should make adult versions,” says Ishiwari.
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