Scientists Build Neonatal Incubator From Car Parts

Peace Corps Online writes "The NYTimes ran a story this week about a group of scientists who have built a neonatal incubator out of automobile parts, including a pair of headlights as a heat source, a car door alarm to signal emergencies, and an auto air filter and fan to provide climate control. The creators of the car-parts incubator say that an incubator found in any neonatal intensive care unit in the US could cost around $40,000, but the incubator they have developed can be built for less than $1,000. One expert says as many as 1.8 million infants might be spared every year if they could spend just a week in the units, which help babies who are born early or at low birth weights regulate their body temperature until their organs fully develop. Experts say in developing countries where infant mortality is most common, high-tech machines donated by richer nations often conk out when the electricity fizzles or is restricted to conserve power. 'The future medical technologists in the developing world,' says Robert Malkin, director of Engineering World Health, 'are the current car mechanics, HVAC repairmen, bicycle shop repairmen. There is no other good source of technology-savvy individuals to take up the future of medical device repair and maintenance.'"

Cool

[skiphoppotamus]

I work at Children's Mercy Hospital and Clinics in the ICN and I can tell you from first hand every day experience that creating affordable incubators that can be brought into lesser hospitals would dramatically help what is an increasingly high premature birth rate here in the Midwest.

Re:but

[Vectronic]

Thats sarcasm right?... cause, you know with stuff like...

Police have seized more than 25,000 cars in Greater Manchester since new powers to tackle rogue drivers were introduced last year.
More than 10,000 have been crushed. [manchester...news.co.uk]

And thats in "Greater" Manchester alone, which is about 3 million people or so... and that doesnt include just normally scrapped vehicles, or accidents.

Calculate that for various other locations in the world.

Re:-1 misses the point?

[Slashdotvagina]

Um, the problem isn't a lack of repairmen Mr Malkin - it's a lack of electricity. A problem which this incubator doesn't fix. (No, the motorcycle battery isn't a fix. It's a backup. With no electricity, this incubator dies just as dead as a high tech one.)

Not a problem. A small motorcycle internal combustion engine could run continuously to provide electricity via a generator. Now all that's required are babies that breathe carbon monoxide.

Re:What does this really mean?

[Davemania]

Thats because the stringent testing that is required for medical devices. If we're talking about devices that doesn't play any pivotal role in medical treatment, it often doesn't require the verification and stringent testing and would cost significantly less(alot of the cost for devices are on clinical tests). Imagine if you use a off the shelf monitor for a multi-million dollar imaging machine, and it failed to display a small cancerous anomaly correctly ...
This article doesn't really say anything about the current state of medical devices, it just simply costs alot to build and verify they work in an acceptable manner for medical purposes. I don't think the machines talked about in these article will ever be adopted in the west. I doubt the reliability of these components will be up to scratch compare to the regular prenatal care machines BUT for third world countries where the medicial facilities are so poor, its probably worthy to think about adopting these machines as a temporary stop gap and thats probably the point of this exercise.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:but

[xaxa]

Ok cars are expensive outside of the Nanny State then. Here in Amerikkka you can't just take people's cars for speeding or reckless driving.

Here in the Nanny State we have a lot less road deaths.

Most seized cars were uninsured. If you pay the fines you can get the car back, but if you've been banned from driving for a year or two for driving uninsured and your car wasn't worth much anyway it might not be worth it.

Re:but

[beadfulthings]

Thank you for the first reasonable post in this thread! (I know there are others to follow.) People who don't know any better can talk about birth rates all they want, but it's the infant mortality rate that tells the tale. Combine that with the number of otherwise healthy adults dying from diseases like HIV/AIDS and you have places in Africa where the few children remaining are being raised by their few remaining grandmothers because there aren't any parents left to do the job--or to put in the crops or otherwise bring in money and food.

For the past eight years, very capable American agencies have had their hands tied because they can't mention (for example) the fact that you can prevent the spread of HIV by the use of condoms or that you can space the births of your children by means of condoms or other birth control. I'm optimistic that all this is about to change with the new administration, but a lot of ground has been lost in eight years.

The other issue that hasn't been mentioned is that birth rates may be higher in rural, agrarian, or subsistence-level economies because it takes more people per family to make a living. Children, and large families of them, have been an asset across thousands of years. It's only in the past couple of hundred that this has changed.

Also, idly, I'd entertain thoughts of taking the "let the babies die" folks on a stroll through a neonatal intensive care unit and allowing them to choose which of the babies got to live and which had to die. That's because I also believe at some level that humans who haven't been conditioned or brutalized have a natural instinct to try to save any distressed human young that we happen to run across.

Car parts - cheap!

[Firethorn]

I thought the point of using car parts is that they are cheap, easily available, and run on 12 volts

The thousand dollars quote leads me to believe that you're right - it wouldn't be even a grand if you're taking parts out of a junk yard, but who wants to do that? I figure that these incubators are using new parts, just ones from the automotive industry and not the medical industry for economy of scale and robustness. Though, yes, the ability to use junkyard parts for repairs is mentioned.

For example, most headlights are under $20, so that's only $40 for your heat source. 12V cabling is relatively cheap, there's various thermostats you can get. They're vibration resistant, and a AC-DC transformer will provide a good amount of protection from surges, especially if you put a car battery in the circuit to provide backup. Automotive fuses can provide safety and prevent damage. For that matter, car equipment is designed to take anything from like 12V to 14.4-15V, so it's robust from that angle as well.

The article mentions detractors that say that intervention, skilled delivery people, emergency care would be better. I'd argue that those would cost more - importing a western trained doctor is expensive. Low-hanging fruit, people. One step at a time. Incremental improvement.

Heck, if it's good enough, I'd like to see them in our hospitals. Perhaps a fancier, more expensive model, but still cheap compared to current ones. Look at our healthcare costs. How much money would be saved if we could get, instead of a $40k incubator, a $5k incubator instead? Figure a thousand incubators a state per year(50k total), that'd be $1.75 BILLON saved. Not including any maintenance savings, given that current incubators are maintenance hogs per the article, and I didn't see any mention of parts that you'd expect to replace any given year with the auto one. Sure, not much against the trillions we spend now - but as they say, a billion here and there, and suddenly you're looking at real money. ;)