Infant Incubator from Car Parts to Serve the Poor

Humankind is surely inventive when it comes to survival matters. Hardly could we have imagined a baby incubator built from vehicle parts coming from junkyards.

But Dr. Jonathan Rosen, now at the Boston University School of Management thought of using a pair of headlights as the heat source, a car door alarm to signal emergencies and an auto filter and fan to provide climate control in order to create a low-cost infant incubator to keep the fragile babies warm during their first days of life, The New York Times reported.

It seems that the number of high-tech incubators is not the problem in the developing world's hospitals as they receive donations from the West. What they need is infant incubators that work and that are cheap to be maintained. While conventional incubators can cost $40,000 or more, the incubator made from car parts can be built for less than $1,000.

The ambitious project promoted by the Global Health Initiative at the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology or Cimit (a non-profit Boston consortium teaching hospitals and engineering schools) could help millions of newborn deaths in the developing world.

Dr. Kristian Olson, main investigator of the project, says that the main causes of newborn deaths could be easily treated with the right equipment but ordinary incubators are not very reliable and the costs of repair are usually very high. Therefore, doctors in the developing world resort to pushing the “incubator room” temperatures to100 degrees or more and to swaddling the newborns in plastic to hold in body heat.

After an impressive visit this year to Cut Nyak Dhien Hospital, Meulaboh, Indonesia, Dr. Olson decided to create the cheap incubator. “When I walked in the incubator room,” he said, “a whole family was sobbing around a crib.”  Their 7-day-old baby boy was born slightly underweight and was suffering from infection. After lying a few hours on a cold cot, the baby died although he could have survived with warmth and proper care.

Given that, the low-cost incubator would be a magnificent solution although as each innovative creation there are a few skeptics claiming this won't solve the problem of infant death. Among them, Dr. Stephen Wall, a senior research adviser at Save the Children promotes a strategy called kangaroo mother care, in which an infant is placed on the mother’s chest immediately and continuously after birth. The obvious question would be: what if the mother is not in the condition to do it?! Looks like the car part incubator is not so bad after all...