In this post I am going to talk about Embrace, a baby warmer that was created by the students of The Design for Extreme Affordability course at Stanford University.

Embrace was developed to solve the problem of high mortality rates in premature and low-birth-weight babies in developing countries.

The Problem

Each year, 20 million premature and low-birth-weight babies are born

In developing countries the mortality rate of these children is quite high as incubators in these countries are quite rare. 

Moreover, hospitals and clinics in these countries don’t have enough incubators to cater to the extreme demand.

Last but not least, to purchase new incubators was overwhelming from a cost standpoint and incubators received by way of donations lacked simplicity of use and were very difficult to maintain. 

So the Extreme Affordability students were challenged to design a better incubator for the developing world.

The Insight

The Embrace team began their need finding in Kathmandu, the capital city of Nepal.

After spending several days observing the neonatal unit of the Kathmandu hospital, the team asked to be taken outside the city to see how premature infants were cared for in rural areas.

They learned two alarming things: First, the overwhelming majority of all premature Nepalese infants were born in these rural areas. And second, most of these infants would never make it to a hospital.

They realized that no matter how good their design for a new incubator was, it would never help these babies if it stayed in a hospital.

To save the maximum number of lives, their design would have to function in a rural environment.

It would have to work without electricity and be transportable, intuitive, sanitizable, culturally appropriate, and perhaps most importantly—inexpensive.

The Embrace Incubator

By the end of class, the team had created their first prototype of the Embrace Incubator.

The design looked something like a sleeping bag.

It wrapped around a premature infant, and a pouch of phase-change material (PCM) kept the baby’s body at exactly the right temperature—and maintained this temperature for up to four hours.

After four hours, the PCM pouch could be “recharged” by submerging it in boiling water for a few minutes.

The Embrace Incubator is small and light, making it easy and inexpensive to transport to rural villages.

The entire sleeping bag can be sanitized in boiling water.

It is far more intuitive to use than traditional incubators, and fits well into the recommended practice of “Kangaroo Care,” where a mother holds her baby against her skin.

Finally, compared to the $20,000 price of a traditional incubator, the Embrace incubator only costs $25.

The product uses an innovative wax incorporated in a sleeping bag to regulate a baby’s temperature.

It stays warm without electricity, has no moving parts, is portable and is safe and intuitive to use.

The Embrace Infant Warmer can be used in a clinical setting, for transporting babies, and in a community setting.

Conclusion

The whole philosophy of Embrace is that you have to be close to your end user to make a really good design.

Last but not least, according to Nobel prize winning economist Muhammad Yunus, reducing the rate of infant deaths actually helps to control population growth.

The theory is that as parents become more confident of their babies’ survival they are more willing to use contraceptives and have fewer children.

In India, a country of over 1.1 billion people, this is a welcomed side effect.

Credit: https://extreme.stanford.edu ( Impactful Solutions for Low Resource Communities)