Case study: CLO # $2,3,$ & $510$ points

Embrace Infant Warmer:

Sometimes a Business Start Is a Matter of Life and Death

Introduction

When Rahul Panicker, Jane Chen, and Linus Liang enrolled in Design for Extreme Affordability, a course taught in the Design School at Stanford University, little did they know that the class would change their lives. And little did they know that, a short three years later, premature babies born in rural India, who often don$$t survive because of hypothermia, would have a new chance at life because of a product they designed. The Design for Extreme Affordability class draws students from across the Stanford campus. The goal of the class is to develop solutions for formidable, real$-$world problems. The project Panicker, Chen, and Liang were assigned was to develop a low$-$cost infant incubator for use in developing countries. This was a topic that the three knew nothing about. They were electrical engineering, MBA, and computer science students, respectively. To get started, they did some simple Google searches. They learned that $15$ million pre$-$term and underweight babies are born annually in developing countries. Three million babies die in the first $28$ days of their life$$that$$s six babies every minute. The biggest cause of death is hypothermia. Premature babies don$$t have enough fat to regulate their body temperature. As a result, they can literally freeze to death in a room that is at room temperature. Nearly half of the world$$s low$-$birth$-$weight babies are born in India. Hospitals have incubators that provide consistent, lifesaving heat to premature babies. But incubators cost up to $$20,000$ apiece, require a constant supply of electricity, and are difficult to operate. The obvious solution was to drive down the cost of incubators. The team could systematically reduce the cost of traditional incubators by eliminating nonessential parts and using cheaper materials. Rather than moving forward, Liang got funding for a trip to Nepal to study incubators in developing countries. While visiting a hospital, he noticed something that was odd. Many of the incubators were empty. He then learned the sad truth. About $80$ percent of the premature babies born in the developing world are born in rural villages. They aren$$t brought to a hospital and placed in an incubator. Even when they are, they$$re often taken home before the baby is ready to leave due to family needs back at the village. Back at Stanford, the team grappled with what to do with the insight. The easier road ahead would be to redesign the traditional incubator in order to make them more affordable. But that wasn$$t the answer. The harder challenge was to find a solution for saving premature babies where they were born$$in rural villages.

Early Prototypes

The team tackled the harder challenge: How to create a baby$-$warming device that doctors and parents in rural villages could use to save premature babies? The team set to work and started creating rough prototypes of an original design. The earliest prototypes were made using old sleeping bags, baby dolls, and blankets. The design was a portable infant warmer that looks like a tiny sleeping bag. The warmer opens in the front, allowing mothers to nurse their babies and maintain intimate contact. The bag contained a pouch of wax$-$like, phase$-$change material that keeps the baby warm for up to six hours at regular body temperatures. It required just $30$ minutes of electricity to heat the pouch, an ideal situation for areas where the availability of electricity is spotty. To provide additional warmth, mothers would be instructed to hold their babies as much as possible against their skin. This activity prompted the team to call the product $$Embrace$.$ The class ended and the team had a decision to make. All had promising prospects. In the end, the team members couldn$$t walk away. The lives of premature babies were at stake. They would move forward and continue to work on what was now known as the Embrace Infant Warmer.

Embrace Infant Warmer

The team, now joined by a fourth Stanford student, Naganand Murty, took the prototype to India to solicit customer feedback. They used rapid prototyping techniques to iterate on feedback and zero in on the attributes that are of highest relevance and value in a rural setting. Some of what they found out was surprising, and would have never been learned had they remained in California. For example, they found that women in India believe that Western medicine is very powerful, so they routinely cut back on the recommended dosages of Western medicines, just to be safe. That knowledge impacted early prototypes of the Embrace Infant Warmer. The early prototypes instructed mothers to set the temperature at $37$ degrees Celsius. What they found was that the devices were being set at about $30$ degrees. To solve the problem, they preprogrammed the ideal temperature into the device and just put an OK and Not OK switch on it$.$ Commenting on the de