Every hour, 450 low-birthweight babies die in the developing world. Despite mother love and warm blankets, their tiny bodies don’t have enough fat to regulate temperature and protect fragile organs. Outcomes would improve with better access to incubators, but the $20,000 per unit cost, not to mention the need for electricity, makes this an impractical solution for rural villages.
A low-tech alternative incubated on the Stanford University campus is now getting ready to roll out in India, which has an unfortunate corner on the world market of low-birth-weight babies. Embrace, a fledgling nonprofit, will soon begin distributing a baby warmer that looks like a miniature sleeping bag. It features a special insert containing a waxy compound. When heated by hot water, this phase-changing material maintains a constant temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit for up to four hours. At a unit price of about $25, the baby warmer is a low-cost but potentially highimpact innovation.
Embrace CEO Jane Chen was part of the product development team, which included engineering and business students in a class called Entrepreneurial Designfor Extreme Affordability. By the end of spring term 2007, they had reviewed medical research, dispatched a team member to Nepal for fieldwork, and come up with a basic prototype for the sleeping bag.
“We knew we were sitting on a great idea,” Chen says. They had other matters to attend to—such as finishing graduate school—before incorporating as a nonprofit in early 2008. That same year, Chen and cofounder Rahul Panicker were named Echoing Green fellows. Prizes and additional foundation support brought their 2009 budget to $400,000. A high-powered team of advisors includes Stanford President John Hennessy.
To gather more grassroots feedback, Chen traveled to India to share the prototype with the “midwives and moms” who will be the intended audience. “There was great receptiveness. This was something that people just understood immediately,” she says. Focus groups added critical feedback. Indians recommended against using white, for instance, because that’s the color associated with death and mourning. Design iterations have resulted in a product that’s waterproof, reusable, easily repaired, and made to fit snugly against a mother’s chest to ensure newborn bonding.
Embrace expects to start distributing in 2010 through a network of health professionals, midwives, and NGOs. To build its grassroots network, Embrace moved operations to India in early summer. In Hubli, located about 250 miles north of Bangalore, Embrace is the newest player in a regional “sandbox” funded by the Deshpande Foundation, a family foundation based in Stoneham, Mass.
“We’re trying to create an ecosystem for innovation and entrepreneurship in this region of India,” explains Nishith Acharya, the foundation’s executive director. Foundation support brings logistical help, including transportation and office space for the Embrace team and interns. It also means introductions to the 70 other NGOs at work in the sandbox, along with others whose buy-in will be critical to ramping up distribution and marketing efforts.
Read more stories by Suzie Boss.