The National Institutes of Health has awarded our longtime partner MaineHealth a four-year, $2.8 million grant to continue developing HoloBaby™, the mixed reality neonatal resuscitation simulator built by clinicians at MaineHealth Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital together with the Interactive Commons at CWRU.
The award, announced by MaineHealth in September 2025, comes from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, with additional funding from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. It targets a stark gap in rural care: delivery teams at smaller hospitals see too few births to keep their resuscitation skills sharp, and traditional simulation training is costly. According to MaineHealth, newborns who need resuscitation at rural hospitals face four times the risk of birth asphyxia as those born at a major urban hospital. As Dr. Mary Ottolini put it, a baby’s first minutes of life “can determine its next 60 years.”
HoloBaby™ was developed by Dr. Ottolini, the George W. Hallett, MD, Chair of Pediatrics at MaineHealth Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital, and co-investigators Drs. Michael Ferguson, Leah Mallory, Allison Zanno and Misty Melendi, working hand in hand with our team at the Interactive Commons. Seed funding from MaineHealth Innovation and Northeastern University’s Roux Institute helped get the project off the ground.
Clinicians training with HoloBaby™ wear augmented reality headsets that layer a responsive virtual newborn onto a low-cost manikin. They hear the baby grunt, cry or struggle to breathe, hear its heartbeat, and watch vital signs and an EKG tracing on a holographic monitor that stays in sync with the baby’s condition. The simulation reacts to the team’s interventions in real time, so teams can rehearse high-stakes scenarios with real equipment in their own delivery rooms, while expert coaches join remotely through telemedicine.
Early studies at MaineHealth’s rural hospitals showed improved adherence to Neonatal Resuscitation Program guidelines and stronger teamwork. The new NIH funding builds on those results and will also support making HoloBaby™ compatible with more operating systems and exploring whether artificial intelligence can improve how the system assesses a care team’s performance.
HoloBaby™ is a model of what we believe partnership should look like: clinicians who know exactly what needs to change, working side by side with a team that can build it in mixed reality. We are proud to have worked with MaineHealth since the project’s earliest pilots, and grateful for the NIH’s investment in bringing this training to the rural teams who need it most.
To learn more about the project, visit our HoloBaby™ Simulation Framework page.
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