#444 - Can a Beanie Protect NICU Infants from Harmful Noise While Keeping Them Connected to Their Parents?

Hello friends 👋

The NICU is one of the loudest environments a newborn will ever experience, yet it is also where the most vulnerable infants spend their earliest, most developmentally critical days. In this Tech Tuesday episode, Ben and Daphna sit down with Gabby Daltoso and Sophie Ishiwari, co-founders of the Sonura Beanie. Their device tackles two pressing NICU challenges at once: harmful noise exposure and disrupted parental connection. By embedding a low-pass filtration system tuned to the acoustic environment of the womb into standard hospital beanies, Sonura attenuates high-frequency alarms while preserving the frequency of the human voice. Parents can also send recordings of songs, stories, and their heartbeat directly to their infant at the bedside. With a feasibility trial underway at Penn Medicine and the University of Pennsylvania President’s Innovation Prize secured, Gabby and Sophie are just getting started.

Website link: https://www.sonuracare.com

Link to episode on youtube: https://youtu.be/2gTSXbNYLo0

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The transcript of today's episode can be found below 👇

Ben Courchia MD (00:00.831) Hello everybody. Welcome back to The Incubator Podcast. We're back today for an episode of Tech Tuesday. Daphna is in the studio this morning. Daphna, good morning. How are you?

Daphna Yasova Barbeau MD (00:07.466) I don't know if we can call them Tech Tuesdays anymore.

Ben Courchia MD (00:11.091) I've made the editorial decision that even though they air on Fridays now, it's still kind of Tech Tuesday — hopefully people are behind on their listening and catch it on Tuesday.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau MD (00:19.978) Anyway, we haven't done a Tech Tuesday in a while and we love Tech Tuesday. I am pumped for this particular one.

Ben Courchia MD (00:28.553) Yeah. Tech Tuesday is something that came from the Casey Neistat days — he had something called Tech Tuesdays on his YouTube channel, and this is me just ripping him off completely. Alright, we have the pleasure of having two phenomenal guests in the studio: Gabby Daltoso and Sophie Ishiwari. Sophie, Gabby, welcome to the podcast.

Gabby Daltoso (01:02.049) Thanks for having us.

Sophie Ishiwari (01:03.224) Yeah, thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here.

Ben Courchia MD (01:05.514) You guys are the co-founders of the Sonura Beanie — Sonura is spelled S-O-N-U-R-A. I'm not going to say more about this just yet, but it's quite an impressive project. You worked on this as undergrads, which — as I was saying off air — I thought I had a pretty successful undergrad career, and then you read about people like you and think: what was I doing with my time?

Daphna Yasova Barbeau MD (01:30.29) Yeah, what was I doing? Cleaning out mouse cages.

Ben Courchia MD (01:36.223) Exactly. You are addressing an issue we are all very familiar with in the NICU — the environment in which our babies are placed. We had a recent episode from the On with Vaughn series where we talked about the NICU environment and neuropromotion versus neuroprotection, and I feel like your work really aligns with that mission in terms of reducing harmful exposure to loud noises. Gabby, Sophie, can one of you tell us in a few words: what is the Sonura Beanie, what is it trying to do?

Sophie Ishiwari (02:21.292) Sure. Gabby and I met our senior year at the University of Pennsylvania. We've developed a beanie that provides parental connection and auditory protection for infants in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).

Ben Courchia MD (02:38.635) That's very cool. How did you come up with the idea? I found myself informed about this topic well into my neonatology years, and you tapped into it in undergrad. How did that come up?

Daphna Yasova Barbeau MD (02:56.04) And Ben, you didn't mention this — they were engineering students. So how did you even connect the NICU to your engineering work?

Sophie Ishiwari (03:08.012) Our senior year, we were given the opportunity to shadow in the NICU for one of our classes. Gabby and I shadowed together. The first thing we noticed — not having spent much time in hospitals before — was that there weren't a lot of parents at the bedside, and simultaneously there were constant alarm noises, unlike anything we'd ever heard. Gabby and I were both in a sound engineering class at the time and also had personal experience with family members who'd been hospitalized for long periods and were unreachable. We knew about the parent-child connection piece being lacking. So we thought we could solve this by creating something that allows parents to connect to their infants when they can't physically be in the hospital — and additionally, to support language nutrition and sound protection, we developed a filter that attenuates high-frequency noises while allowing low-frequency sounds through.

Ben Courchia MD (04:23.595) Thank you, Daphna, for highlighting that Sophie and Gabby are engineers. Can I say that? You're engineers. As engineering students at the time, your instinct must have been: let's measure. Can you tell us what you actually found when you moved from a subjective impression to objective measurement?

Daphna Yasova Barbeau MD (04:54.594) Yeah — what was the needs assessment?

Gabby Daltoso (04:58.956) After that first experience in the NICU, Sophie and I spent probably the entire first semester of our senior year interviewing any physician who would get on the phone with us. We ended up interviewing over 200 neonatologists across the US. We needed a range — we're at an academic institution, but there are community hospitals, large NICUs. We needed to know: is this a problem across the board? The response was overwhelmingly: we need a solution.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau MD (05:35.145) Gabby, were these virtual interviews? Because that in itself — 200 neonatologists — even surveying 200 would have been a feat. Interviewing them is really tremendous.

Gabby Daltoso (05:39.47) Yes, virtual interviews.

Sophie Ishiwari (05:57.976) We found ourselves masters of the cold email by the end of it — we pride ourselves on that now.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau MD (06:05.065) What did they say?

Gabby Daltoso (06:18.828) A lot of them commented on the environment, as expected. We found that typically one person per group is really focused on developmental care, which became a focus for Sophie and me. But many also mentioned that it's a hard problem to solve, because the first priority is saving the infant's life — you can't simply turn off alarms that are there for a reason. It's a contradictory challenge.

Ben Courchia MD (06:52.683) For sure. So after identifying this issue — what makes the Sonura Beanie so special?

Sophie Ishiwari (07:12.044) Like I mentioned, we were in a sound engineering class simultaneously. We asked ourselves: what kind of filtration system would be most effective? We developed a low-pass filtration system tuned to the frequency that the womb naturally attenuates — we say we mimic the auditory environment of the womb. It almost sounds like you're underwater.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau MD (07:41.065) What is the frequency of the womb?

Gabby Daltoso (07:46.188) Everything above approximately 500 Hz is generally filtered out. In a hospital setting, that's alarms, trash cans banging, squeaking doors — all of those sounds. The fundamental frequency of the human voice sits below 500 Hz, so that passes through and can be heard by the infant.

Ben Courchia MD (08:05.961) Is it a true beanie or something that just covers the ears?

Sophie Ishiwari (08:21.742) Right now it's a full beanie — it covers the whole head. We actually use the beanies hospitals already have on hand and sew our technology into those, to make the workflow as easy as possible.

Ben Courchia MD (08:34.493) And in addition to the filtration system, there's also an intervention component — the introduction of positive sounds for the baby. Can you tell us about that?

Sophie Ishiwari (08:54.69) Yes — we're really focused on making sure these infants get the language nutrition we know they need. As bioengineers, we know this is one of the most developmentally crucial periods of their lives. We wanted to both support these infants and connect them with their parents. So we allow parents to send songs, stories, prompts, and even their heartbeat to their infant when they can't be physically at the bedside — they simply record whenever they can and send it.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau MD (09:33.374) When sounds are fed to the infant, do they come across womb-like or live? Either way it's very cool — we try playing things outside the isolette and babies sometimes don't hear them or the sound comes out distorted. What does that future look like?

Sophie Ishiwari (10:08.043) We run the audio through our filter to make sure any accidental high-frequency sounds are attenuated. We also have a decibel check — so if a parent is speaking very loudly, it's filtered down to an acceptable decibel level for the infant.

Ben Courchia MD (10:35.679) So it's not just a headphone output — there's a real system of checks and feedback to ensure sound reaches the baby safely, without recreating the problem you're trying to solve.

Gabby Daltoso (10:56.854) Exactly.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau MD (10:59.251) Tell us about your experience taking the beanie into NICUs. What has the reception been like — from families, from staff?

Gabby Daltoso (11:18.322) Sophie, do you want to share about the trial?

Sophie Ishiwari (11:21.804) Sure. We're running our trial at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, and we're about halfway through. The reception has been incredible — almost every parent we approach is excited to participate. We actually had a parent who hadn't yet given birth ask if they could be part of the study. On the recording side, it's phenomenal. Parents bring in their whole families to send messages. One of our prompts is: "What are you most excited to do with your child when they grow up?" The responses are incredibly heartwarming. I get to listen to them because I run them through the filtration system — it makes everything worth it.

Ben Courchia MD (12:32.2) It's always nice when work is both intellectually stimulating and deeply meaningful. What outcomes are you measuring? How do you determine whether the beanie is achieving what you hoped?

Sophie Ishiwari (13:02.454) The literature has already established that both decreased sound in the NICU and access to the mother's voice reduce infant stress and improve growth outcomes. For our first feasibility study, we're measuring decreased stress — via heart rate, respiratory rate, and oxygen saturation — as well as nursing usability, because we know that's critically important. And we're measuring parent reception: how parents feel sending messages and whether they would send more.

Ben Courchia MD (13:33.257) You figured out a very important piece of our world.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau MD (13:34.343) Nailed it. Absolutely nailed it.

Ben Courchia MD (13:46.347) Your work has been attracting significant attention — from media outlets and presentation opportunities at various meetings. How has that been?

Gabby Daltoso (14:10.504) It's been exciting and validating. We knew early on there was enthusiasm from the medical community, and that support has been invaluable in development. But the media exposure has built a community of parents we now have access to. We constantly get emails from people who saw coverage somewhere and reach out to say they were NICU parents and want to help. It really takes a village to bring something like this to life, and we're seeing the benefits of that global push.

Ben Courchia MD (14:55.056) You also won the University of Pennsylvania President's Innovation Prize — congratulations on that.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau MD (15:03.913) That's a really important point. What has that infrastructure meant for your ability to focus on this work?

Gabby Daltoso (15:24.404) The President's Prize is the largest entrepreneurial prize for undergraduates in the United States. It provided seed, non-dilutive funding to get started, along with an office, salaries, and access to Penn trustees. We've had adoption from the Penn Med executive team, continued publication support, and alumni connections. We're really grateful to Penn and to the hospital for opening their doors to non-medical students to do clinical work. It's been incredible.

Ben Courchia MD (16:13.259) What is the status of the project today? This is the Shark Tank portion of the episode — what can the community actually do? Is the beanie available for purchase? Are you looking for collaborators?

Gabby Daltoso (16:53.28) We're about halfway through our feasibility study. We will be fundraising next — so if anyone knows investors interested in startups, we'd welcome that support. That funding will go toward further product development, followed by our first two pilots. We're not yet through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) process — we've received a letter of classification, and once product development and pilots are complete, we'll submit through the 510(k) pathway.

Ben Courchia MD (17:29.065) You're actively working toward FDA clearance as well. Where can people learn more about Sonura?

Sophie Ishiwari (17:52.076) They can visit our website at www.sonuracare.com, follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn at Sonura Care, or reach us directly at gabby@sonuracare.com or sophie@sonuracare.com. We love hearing from anyone passionate about this.

Ben Courchia MD (18:13.227) That's sonuracare.com — S-O-N-U-R-A-C-A-R-E.com. Gabby, Sophie, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Really, really impressive work.

Sophie Ishiwari (18:28.376) Thank you so much for having us.

Gabby Daltoso (18:28.48) Thanks for having us.

Daphna Yasova Barbeau MD (18:30.675) Keep up the good work.

Ben Courchia MD (18:32.063) Thank you.