Embrace Infant Warmer

Rahul Panicker, Jane Chen and Linus Liang took Stanford’s Design for Extreme Affordability course and were asked to design a low-cost infant incubator for developing countries. Hypothermia is the biggest cause of death for premature babies, and hospital incubators cost up to $20,000, need constant electricity and are hard to operate.

Instead of simply stripping cost from incubators, Liang visited a hospital in Nepal and found many incubators empty: about 80 percent of premature babies in the developing world are born in rural villages. The team designed a portable warmer like a tiny sleeping bag, with a pouch of phase-change material that keeps a baby warm for up to six hours after 30 minutes of electricity, and named it Embrace.

Field testing in India changed the design. Mothers set the temperature lower than instructed because they saw Western medicine as very powerful and cut back to be safe, so the ideal temperature was preprogrammed with an OK/Not OK switch; villagers wanted pricing options such as renting; mothers-in-law were often the decision makers. After more than 60 iterations and clinical trials, Embrace launched in April 2011, with manufacturing in Bangalore, distribution partners such as GE Healthcare and local NGOs, a non-profit arm and a for-profit arm, Embrace Innovations. Reliance on Indian government sales led to Little Lotus, a US retail line launched in 2015.