Out of 20 million premature and underweight babies born each year, four million die. Most are in developing countries. Solving this problem is not just a short-term humanitarian effort, it also constitutes low-hanging fruit in the international development field. When infant mortality goes down, we tend to see population sizes decrease as well.
Poverty can be confoundingly complex, but for these infants the proximal threat is clear: Hypothermia. Without the body fat reserves to regulate their own temperature, babies need external heating. Kangaroo care (skin-to-skin contact with a mother) promotes breast feeding and warms babies to the right temperature but can only ever be part of the solution when mothers have competing survival demands of work and other children.
The incubators we see in well-supported hospitals are expensive, but the real barrier to access is infrastructure. Incubators require a continuous power supply.
Jane Chen was coming out of a Harvard Master’s in public administration when she recognized the enormity of the problem, and it ignited the inventor spirit in her. Five years ago, the Embrace baby warmer was launched at a $200 price tag (roughly 1% of the cost of an incubator). A tiny sleeping bag with a phase-change material pad in the back that holds a constant temperature for up to six hours, the infant warmer can be charged with just a few minutes of AC power supply from a generator.
The first Embrace warmers were distributed to hospitals in India – the places where incubators were in short supply or absent. But when Chen began her field studies of the technology in action, she found that doctors had thousands of patients and couldn’t spare the time to ensure the bags were being used correctly. The people to reach, realized Chen, were the mothers. Love was a great motivator for compliance.
Initial prototypes included a temperature reading with instructions to heat up to 98.6F, but product testing revealed a psychological tendency – which many of us no doubt share – to dial back instructions from doctors on the assumption that a full dose, be it a drug dose or a temperature change, would be too much for a little baby. The mothers were charging the Embrace bag to a suboptimal temperature for fear of overheating their infants. So the newest product iteration features a red X light for ‘not ready’ and a green check mark for ‘ready’.
Further tailoring included a wordless instruction manual for illiterate mothers and a clear plastic window in the front of the bag so that the baby’s colouration and breathing could be monitored without taking it out of its snug warmth.
In a high-tech world, hands-on inventors and makers like Chen still have a critical place, building very different tech for a world without reliable infrastructure. And depending on which futurists you ask, it may be a skill set we’ll need for our own communities before long.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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