How a warm embrace is saving the lives of infants
When Jane Chen and her team arrived in India in 2008, it was with a bold idea. They wanted to develop a simple, affordable solution to a terrible problem: infant mortality.
They went to the right place. According to a recent Child Mortality report, produced by the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, India accounts for more than a quarter of neonatal deaths worldwide, about 725,000 babies in 2012 alone.
Infant mortality is the result of many factors; Chen and her team decided to focus on the fact that many premature and low birth weight infants are especially vulnerable to hypothermia, and they came up with a design to address this problem. Embrace is a sleeping bag-style baby warmer that can be used when high-tech, hospital-based incubators are not available to mothers who either can’t afford to pay for a hospital stay or who can’t afford to remain away from home (and work) for long periods of time. In contrast, Embrace is portable, affordable and low-tech.
“My team and I realized there was a need for a low-cost, locally appropriate solution to this problem,” Chen said in a talk in early December 2013 at TEDWomen in San Francisco. “It had to be extremely easy and intuitive to use and able to function without a constant supply of electricity.”
In the developing world, access to incubators is limited by cost and distance, and millions of premature babies die each year. TED Fellow Jane Chen shows an invention that could keep millions of these infants warm -- a design that's safe, portable, low-cost and life-saving.
In her 2013 TedWomen Talk, entrepreneur Jane Chen noted that “there are 15 million pre-term and underweight babies born every year around the world and one of the biggest problems they face is staying warm.”
Premature babies can’t properly regulate their body temperatures and need an incubator in order for their organs to develop properly. If a baby is wasting energy on trying to stay warm, a range of problems can result: diabetes, heart disease, low IQ, and sometimes death. Four million of these babies die annually.
Shortly after receiving her MBA from Stanford University, Chen moved to India and set up her company, Embrace Innovations, in order to develop a low-cost, portable, reusable incubator to help women in remote areas of the world where a lack of reliable electricity and the high cost of medical equipment made the traditional incubators we have in hospitals impossible.
After two years of clinical testing, setting up manufacturing and distribution, Chen’s company launched the Embrace. The comfortable infant wrap uses phase-change material to melt at human body temperature and stay the proper temperature for eight hours. After that, the heat source can be replaced with a new one and continuously supply a nurturing environment for babies that need it.
In a new post for Forbes magazine, Chen talks about what happened next.
But then, as she describes it, in a “cruel twist of fate,” the company she had signed on with fired its CEO and the deal she had worked so hard on disappeared overnight. Her company had seven days of cash left.
She went on to describe the whirlwind that many start-ups go through: she took out two bridge loans and asked everyone she knew for small investments to keep her company going until she could arrange another deal. She finally found an angel investor in Marc Benioff, the CEO and founder of Salesforce.com, who had personal experience with his own child needing an incubator. He gave her company the lifeline it needed to stay afloat and give Chen the time she needed to look for a new way forward.
As “someone who has failed many times,” she urges people to “try, try, and try again.” Her biggest lesson? “Don’t waste energy fighting the things that cannot be changed. Instead, adapt to the situation and learn to ride with it.”
It worked for her. Today, Chen’s company is flourishing and she has turned an idea into a product that has helped save thousands of lives. To date, the Embrace has helped over 200,000 children in 15 countries. She hopes to grow to the point where the Embrace will save 1 million babies globally, and recently launched Little Lotus, a line of baby swaddles, sleeping bags and blankets for the US market with a temperature control function to help babies sleep better, and a 1:1 model - every purchase helps to save a baby in a developing country with the Embrace warmer.
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