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