| Abbas Tavakoli, Isabelle Renee Bennett, Robin B. Dail |
Temperature control is important for the health of premature babies. One way to monitor body temperature in premature infants is through continuous measurement of central (abdominal) and peripheral (foot) skin temperature. Fourteen premature infants, born ≤ 32 weeks gestational age and birthweights < 1500 grams were enrolled for study after Institutional Review Board approval and parental consent for participation in this study. Each infant had one skin temperature probe (thermistor) attached to their abdomen and one skin temperature probe to the sole of one foot. Data were stored in the GE Healthcare Omnibed Carestation™ and were downloaded to a laptop computer. . The data for each day included about 86,400 rows. The final datasets for each infant included averaged data for every minute of all variables for 28 days. Lag and several functions in SAS were used to prepare data for analyses. Several programs were used to delete unnecessary rows, create minutes from the time each infant was born to the time infants completed data collection, to replace missing minutes, combine and merge different datasets. GPLOT procedure in SAS and R software were used to create graph. Data creations were performed using SAS/STAT® statistical software, version 9.4. |