A warm embrace that saves lives Jane Chen

please close your eyes and open your

hands now imagine what you could place

in your hands an apple maybe your wallet

now open your eyes

what about a life what you see here is a

premature baby he looks like he’s

resting peacefully but in fact he’s

struggling to stay alive because he

can’t regulate his own body temperature

this baby is so tiny he doesn’t have

enough fat on his body to stay warm

sadly 20 million babies like this are

born every year around the world 4

million of these babies die annually but

the bigger problem is that the ones who

do survive grow up with severe long-term

health problems the reason is because in

the first month of a baby’s life it’s

only job is to grow if it’s battling

hypothermia its organs can’t develop

normally resulting in a range of health

problems from diabetes to heart disease

to low IQ imagine many of these problems

could be prevented if these babies were

just kept warm that is the primary

function of an incubator but traditional

incubators require electricity and cost

up to $20,000 so you’re not going to

find them in rural areas of developing

countries as a result parents resort to

local solutions like tying hot water

bottles around their babies bodies or

placing them under light bulbs like the

ones you see here methods that are both

ineffective and unsafe I’ve seen this

firsthand over and over again I’m one of

my first trips to India I met this young

woman Savita were just given birth to a

tiny premature baby Rani

she took her baby to the nearest village

clinic and the doctor advised her to

take Rani to a City Hospital so she

could be placed in an incubator but that

Hospital was over four hours away and

Savita didn’t have the means to get

there so her baby died inspired by the

story and dozens of other similar

stories like this my team and I realized

what was needed was a local solution

something that could work without

electricity that was simple enough for a

mother or a midwife to use given that

the majority of births still take place

in the home we needed something that was

portable something that could be

sterilized and reused

across multiple babies and something

ultra low-cost compared to the $20,000

that an incubator in the u.s. costs so

this is what we came up with what you

see here looks nothing like an incubator

looks like a small sleeping bag for a

baby you can open it up completely it’s

waterproof there’s no seams inside so

you can sterilize it very easily but the

magic is in this pouch of wax this is a

phase change material it’s a wax like

substance with the melting point of

human body temperature 37 degrees

Celsius you can melt this simply using

hot water and then when it melts it’s

able to maintain one constant

temperature for four to six hours at a

time after which you simply reheat the

pouch so you then place it into this

little pocket back here and it creates a

warm micro environment for the baby

look simple but we’ve reiterated this

dozens of times by going into the field

to talk to doctors moms and clinicians

to ensure that this really meets the

needs of the local communities we plan

to launch this product in India in 2010

and the target price point will be 25

dollars less than 0.1% of the cost of a

traditional incubator over the next five

years we hope to save the lives of

almost a million babies but the

longer-term social impact is a reduction

in population growth the seems

counterintuitive but turns out that as

infant mortality is reduced population

sizes also decrease because parents

don’t need to anticipate that their

babies are going to die we hope that the

embrace infant warmer and other simple

innovations like this represent a new

trend for the future of Technology

simple localized affordable solutions

that have the potential to make huge

social impact in designing this we

followed a few basic principles we

really try to understand the end user in

this case cut people like Savita we try

to understand the root of the problem

rather than being biased by what already

exists and then we thought of the most

simple solution we could to address this

problem and doing this I believe we can

truly bring technology to the masses

and we can save millions of lives

through the simple warmth of an embrace