The birth of Embrace Infant Warmer - Creative Confidence #11
Rahul Panicker, Jane Chen, Linus Liang and Naganand Murty, students of a design course, turned a class assignment into a real life product.
They designed the Embrace Infant Warmer: a medical device that costs 99 percent less than a traditional baby incubator.
Their project was to research and design a low-cost infant incubator for use in the developing world. No one in the team knew much about the complications of premature birth, let alone medical product design for other countries.
Their first step was to look outward for inspiration.
From a coffee house, the four students Googled the global infant mortality problem and found statistics that astonished them.
Each year, about fifteen million premature and low-birth-weight babies are born. A million of them perish, often within twenty-four hours of birth. The biggest cause? Hypothermia.
But hospital incubators, which can provide consistent, life-saving heat during those crucial first days can cost as much as $20,000, each.
The obvious solution was to reduce the cost of existing incubator designs by eliminating parts and using cheaper materials.
Then, Linus Liang got funding for a trip to Nepal in order to more deeply understand firsthand the unmet needs associated with incubators. There he found that many hospital incubators were going unused. The babies who needed them were often born in villages.
Linus realized that incubator cost was just one design challenge in a complex web of human needs. The life-and-death battles were being fought in the mother’s home, not the hospital.
And after discussion, instead of creating another hospital incubator, they reframed the design challenge as: How might we create a baby-warming device that helps parents in remote villages give their dying infants a chance to survive?
The team came up with the infant warmer, shaped like a tiny sleeping bag. It contains a paraffin-based pouch that, once warmed in a heater, can maintain its temperature for up to four hours. The solution could be used outside of hospitals to keep a baby warm at the correct temperature anywhere in the world.
Lesson:
Innovation can happen anywhere. It's fueled by a restless curiosity, deep optimism, and a mindset that encourages not just ideas but action.
[Creative Confidence Newsletter: 11 of 25]
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