Infant Incubator and Isolation Unit
The Need
Worldwide, every year, over four million infants die within a month of birth. Of this number, 3.9 million belong to the developing world. Twenty-five percent of these deaths are due to complications of prematurity, most often heat and water loss. In developing countries, not only is there limited access to modern, high-tech incubators, but a lack of infrastructure and replacement parts render such devices worthless. Many of these developing regions are further burdened by war and ethnic conflict. Such conditions adversely affect the overall health care and nutrition of the populace, and therefore increase the occurrence of prematurity and neonatal complications.
The goal of this project will be to develop a functioning prototype of a low-cost incubator and isolation unit, for infant care in developing countries, in collaboration with our project client Medicine Mondiale and the Kanti Children’s Hospital in Nepal. This product will be designed to address two specific health issues. First, the product will assist at-risk babies—including those that are premature, have respiratory complications, bacterial infections or low bodyweight—with temperature regulation and breathing, by providing for a constant temperature environment with high oxygen content. Second, the device will allow for air filtration to reduce the incidence of cross infections, which can occur in hospital environments.
Since project launch, we have recruited five student teams at MIT, Stanford, the Rhode Island School of Design and Arizona State University. Each team is concentrating on different aspects of the design concept development and market research. In addition, IDEO has committed staff time and resources to product research and mentoring student teams. The initial user research and product testing will take place in Nepal, where Medicine Mondiale has an extensive network of contacts among health care providers and local manufacturers. You can follow the action on this project through the incubator pages on the DtM news blog.
The Client: Medicine Mondiale
Medicine Mondiale was founded in 2003 by New Zealand scientist and social entrepreneur, Ray Avery. As Technical Advisor to The Fred Hollows Foundation, Ray was responsible for building and commissioning two state-of-the-art Intraocular Lens (IOL) Laboratories, one in Eritrea and another in Nepal. The introduction of the Fred Hollows intraocular lens in 1994—together with the efforts of other generic lens manufacturers—has seen the price of intraocular lenses decrease from US$300 to less than US$6.00, making modern cataract surgery accessible to the poorest of the poor in developing countries.
