Givin a Life through Embrace!!!

A School friend of mine wanted me to post about a great work bein dreamt and carried out by a bunch of young enthusiasts who would want to make a difference in a BIG way... Thanks Anjana for givin me an opportunity to write on them and folks belt up and get set to read some AWESOME dream which is bein made into reality and if you think you can help, get in touch with them and MAKE a DIFFERENCE :-)

Vision

20 million premature and low-birth-weight (LBW) babies are born every year. In India alone, a third of all babies born are LBW. 80% of these births occur in rural areas of developing countries. 3.5 million of these babies die, while those that survive often develop life-long health problems like early onset of diabetes, heart disease, and low IQ. Sadly, these problems could be prevented with access to an incubator, a device that provides a stable thermal environment for the baby. This is critical for LBW infants. However, traditional incubators cost thousands of dollars, and are available primarily in urban hospitals. Even when available, they are largely in disrepair. Most rural parents cannot afford to get their babies to these urban hospitals.

Embrace is an incubator, designed to work in a rural healthcare center or at home. It uses no electricity, has no moving parts, is portable, and is safe and intuitive to use. It uses an innovative phase-change material (PCM) in a sleeping bag design to regulate a baby's temperature at 37C, critical for the infant's survival. Carefully engineered properties of the PCM, along with other aspects of the design, ensure the right temperature for the baby at all times. The device works for over four hours at a stretch without intervention, after which it can be reheated. Four hours is longer than the duration between two successive feedings of the baby, to ensure sufficient monitoring. The device is easy to sterilize, and thus reusable across babies. And finally, it facilitates and complements the widely practiced technique of kangaroo mother care, thus enabling mother-baby bonding.

Embrace bridges the gap in healthcare available to a rural-born and an urban-born baby. It will improve the health of LBW babies who would otherwise die or develop serious medical conditions. It will also put an end to current unsafe practices of caring for LBW babies, including placing them under light bulbs or tying hot-water bottles to their bodies. One of the U.N. millennium development goals is the reduction of infant mortality by two-thirds by 2015. The Embrace incubator is an innovative technology that will help families save their children, and governments work towards this goal.

Embrace is a sustainable social venture that came out of the Entrepreneurial Design For Extreme Affordability class at Stanford University. We are a team of business, engineering, and public policy graduate students, with experience in non-profit health care, product design, medical device consulting, management consulting, the UNDP, World Bank, and the Ashoka Foundation. We are being advised by world renowned experts in neonatal care, public health policy, health care in the developing world, business, and product design.

More details on http://embraceglobal.org