Scientists Build Neonatal Incubator From Car Parts 211
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.'"
What does this really mean? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:-1 misses the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you missed the point. The point is that this can be repaired with car parts by a mechanic and is more robust than the higher tech units. Having cheaper more robust technology is important for developing nations since it allows first world countries to help bootstrap improvements to their quality of life. While I can't speak to how many hospitals are lacking electricity, I would say this is going to enrich the lives of many people around the world and is definitely a good thing.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cool (Score:4, Insightful)
I get the feeling that better prenatal care of the mother would prevent a lot of those premature births. A lot more than better incubators, I'm sure.
Economy of scale (Score:3, Insightful)
I didn't RTFA, but what a lot of commenters seem to be missing is the concept of economy of scale. The great idea here seems to be that using "off the shelf", mass-produced car parts to create an incubator with equal functionality to that of a standard incubator saves a great deal of money. Plus, the car parts have been better tested and are apparently more reliable. So this is kind of like building a software system by combining lots of preexisting, well-tested components rather than custom designing everything in-house.
Too much legal liability. (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't see it happening.
The medical industry is all about litigation. If you invent something that saves peoples lives, then of the 100 people it saves, there might be someone who dies anyway, because of device failure and you can be sure that some lawyer's already prefilled out the lawsuit against you and is just waiting for an opportunity.
A friend of mine invented a very simply device that measured skin resistance and could be placed over someone's torso (like a blanket) to look for internal bleeding. This isn't just some inventor guy, he works as an engineer in one of Australia's top universities.
As soon as the university lawyers found out it had a medical application, they killed the project.
There's no doubt it would have saved lives, but the sad truth is that the university involved would actually rather see those people die than risk the litigation of being sued if anyone tried to prove that someone actually died of the device if it was somehow misused by a paramedic at the scene of an accident.
And I don't think it's likely to change. There's too much money invested in keeping medicine esoteric and away from everyone else too allow too many companies in to dilute the spend of sick people.
Maybe it's a rant, but it's a sad truth that I beleive. Doctors are pretty much the only people who seem to get away with doing this kind of research but even then I've read of far too many doctors who are persecuted because they came up with some kind of new treatment/device.
I'm guessing that car-parts-incubators is just radical enough to get anyone who tries to market it into trouble. Even if it saved a million livess, it would bring a thousand lawsuits and while I'm sure if some parents saw an infant die because of a lack of incubators, they would say these are needed, but if an infant dies while it's in an incubator, they'll look for someone to blame. Not that commercial units are any more reliable. But what judge is going to beleive that a $1000 unit was just as good as a $40,000 unit?
Please excuse my cynicism. It's just that I've observed this more than a few times.
GrpA.
Re:Too much legal liability. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What does this really mean? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:but (Score:5, Insightful)
I dont see what that has to do with it, do a search for "american junkyard" or "african scrapyard", etc, etc.
There are millions of cars just sitting around all over the world, and stuff like air-conditioning has been around since the 1950's or so, headlights for even longer, etc.
It's not like we need to create an incubator for every baby born or anything either, there's what, 20,000 or so cities in the US? say, 2 incubators per city, thats 40,000, easily do-able, and a savings of about $1,560,000,000 (provided all 40,000 cities needed new incubators, lol)
Everett's Auto Parts [yardquest.com] ... Everett's recycles over 10,000 cars a year and has more than a thousand cars in stock for you to find just the parts you need. You can even ask us to find those parts for you!...
That single junkyard could do it in about 16 years or so (given that not all vehicles have air-con, working lights, etc), nevermind the other hundreds maybe thousands of other salvage and junkyards in the US, nevermind elsewhere in the world...
You get the idea.
Honestly, i dont really give a damn about the incubators, but the point is its a worthwhile recycling program, plus it uses a relatively small amount of the vehicles, leaving a large amount of other parts that could (should) be used for other things.
Re:but (Score:3, Insightful)
Looking at our species the same law naturally applies, and its effects can be clearly seen. If you look at the countries with high birth rates [wikipedia.org], you will see they are also the ones with high mortality rates [wikipedia.org]. In the short term there will be a population increase but in the long term it will stabilize. The initial increase can (and should) be reduced by providing contraceptives, legalizing abortion, teaching sexual education in schools, and minimizing the influence of religion (if it goes against the first 3). These are things that all modern societies have done, I don't see any reason why others would be unable to do so.
Dear God (Score:5, Insightful)
I fail to see how making incubators cheaper/more prevalent can be seen as anything other than a good thing. Following your line of logic it'd seem the logical extreme would be bombing continents for the good of the "civilised" western world...
Re:What does this really mean? (Score:3, Insightful)
Most FDA regulations are in place because someone died from a malfunction. The FDA is a very reactionary organization. They do not think ahead, they are trying to prevent a repeat of past problems. The problem is, there have been many problems that we do not want to repeat.
Re:but (Score:4, Insightful)
First, so long as countries have a high birth rate, any technological advance only delays (and magnifies) the coming Malthusian disaster.
True, but when higher technology is actually available, the birth rate drops. This has held true for about 1/3 of the earths population across several cultures.
Secondly, many of the technological advances are temporary, especially in 3rd world countries, as they depend on cheap oil for mechanisation, fertiliser and pesticides.
Right, in the long run the only solution is to covert them into first world countries.
Re:but (Score:4, Insightful)
Looking at our species the same law naturally applies...
The numbers work out the same, but I don't think it's due to that law. In nature, choosing an R-type (many and cheap) or K-type (few and expensive) reproductive strategy is something the occurs at a genetic level, and has to happen because resources are limited.
But since that balance is in the genes, you can 'break' that law by putting the creature in an unnatural situation. Bacteria in culture or rabbits in Australia can have low mortality and rapid reproduction, because they aren't being held back by predators or a lack of resources. Human beings are in a similar situation in the first world - we could easily have an average of eight children per female like in the third world and still have very low mortality - but we don't, so some other factor must be involved.
I'd heard it was quite tough in the USA... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd heard teaching birth control in countries with strong Christian cultures like the USA [duggarfamily.com] is tough is as well...
Re:but (Score:1, Insightful)
Nice one. You're obviously not a parent...
Re:but (Score:1, Insightful)
When you're a rabbit in Australia, you have three choices. Eat, Sleep, Reproduce.
When you're a woman in a first world country, you have a few more choices. Some of these choices (career?) beat out the whole "vagina=clown car" system.
Re:I'd heard it was quite tough in the USA... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Too much legal liability. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm guessing that car-parts-incubators is just radical enough to get anyone who tries to market it into trouble. Even if it saved a million livess, it would bring a thousand lawsuits and while I'm sure if some parents saw an infant die because of a lack of incubators, they would say these are needed, but if an infant dies while it's in an incubator, they'll look for someone to blame. Not that commercial units are any more reliable. But what judge is going to beleive that a $1000 unit was just as good as a $40,000 unit?
This device is supposed to be for places like Africa, where parts are expensive, hard to come by, and the locals aren't trained to repair the medical technology.
Your concerns would certainly be valid in the industrialized rich world, where people have lots of money to pay lawyers to sue medical companies. I kind of doubt that that's the case in a lot of countries in Africa. Poor people don't sue.
Talk to the chicken farmers (Score:3, Insightful)
Why Not Strive For Both? (Score:3, Insightful)
Parent is right but its a little to late to discuss that when the child is already there. And not to mention the cost of health service and insurance "quirks" may make it unaffordable to some anyway.
Why not get the best of all worlds? It is possible to strive for better, cheaper prenatal care and better, cheaper incubators.
Re:I'm one of those repairmen... (Score:4, Insightful)
I used to be an electronic technician in the medical device field (until I got fired for cutting through impenetrable FDA red tape regulations too many times).
I have noticed the unbelievable cost difference between medical equipment and consumer electronics that use the same technology. This is due I believe to the cost-plus guaranteed-giant-profit mentality of the entire medical industry in the USA. Every part of the industry; the lawyers, the doctors, the administrators, the drug dealers, the insurance companies, the equipment makers, the FDA regulators, everyone, is working to drive the costs up without any consideration whatsoever for the long term consequences. And these consequences are the premature painful deaths of millions of people who are denied health care in the USA, both now to a limited extent and in the future to a much greater extent.
I'm toying with the idea of an underground health movement that uses 'open-source' medical equipment that is cheap and safe, but illegal because it can't get FDA approval. Nothing in the USA gets FDA approval if it is created outside of the insaisibly greedy medical industry. I've come to the conclusion that whenever people in the USA talk about the need for 'extensive testing and ultimate safety' for medical equipment, they are expressing a code word for getting paid off big time.
Re:Too much legal liability. (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, bonehead, why the hell does everything medical-oriented in lawyer-land cost so damned much? The OP was right! Medical suppliers have a vested interest in making sure that competition does not exist! Whether their involvement is in actually filing lawsuits or simply providing "expert witness" testimony to help lawyers get a settlement, they are raising the bar for anyone else to enter a market that they control with overpriced, overfeatured equipment.
Lawyer-land could use a lot more of these $1k solutions and a lot less of the $40k solutions. Maybe then people could actually afford health care!
Re:but (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps your comment wasn't meant to be flippant WRT life-saving (possible) innovations.
Re:I'd heard it was quite tough in the USA... (Score:2, Insightful)
I am a protestant and fiercely proud of it.