Introduction
Kanga Kare is a team of seven interdisciplinary UC Berkeley students. Our goal is to stop premature infant mortality by providing low cost incubators to developing communities.
My role on this team is to design the incubator using the feedback we gather from medical experts, material specialists, and manufacturers. After finalizing the design, I work with manufacturers to produce the device at a low cost.
Problem
4 million infants die every year from preventable causes and 140 infants die every hour from hypothermic causes alone. We connected with Dr. Pi from the Ngao Hospital in rural Thailand where premature infant mortality is a large problem. Right now, Ngao Hospital, along with others, microwave a bag of green beans and use the bag to keep infants warm. This bag is much too hot initially, burning the baby, and loses its heat too quickly, eventually becoming ineffective.
A photo of the bean bag that rural hospitals use to keep infants warm.
Process
Research
After speaking with a number of medical professionals, we determined that using a technique called Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) is the most beneficial and effective way to nurture an infant.
Kangaroo Mother Care is a symbiotic, skin-to-skin nurturing technique in which a mother will hold her baby on her chest to provide warmth. While this technique is quite natural, it has been backed by leading health organizations including the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Cochrane Collaboration.
In the rural healthcare system, ambulances are used to transport premature infants from rural hospitals to more established tertiary care centers. We believe designing for this period of transportation is the most needed.
Understanding Customer & User Needs
For Kanga Kare, hospitals, both resourced and rural, are our customers. These hospitals need to regulate infant temperature, monitor vitals, and have access to a low cost solution.
Our product's users will be the mothers and these mothers need a way to maintain their bond with their child and so we use Kangaroo Mother Care to address this.
Our Solution - The IncuPack
The IncuPack addresses the critical needs of the hospitals while still keeping the mothers at ease with their child. It integrates monitoring equipment into the garment and reroutes all the lines away from the mother and child, providing for as natural of an experience for the mother and child as possible in an unnatural situation.
Going to Thailand
We were able to travel to Thailand in January 2014 to show our product to the Ngao Hospital. Here we were able to walk the doctors and nurses through its use and receive integral design feedback that we implemented in future iterations.
The team at the Ngao Hospital with me (second from the left) holding the IncuPack
Walking through the proceedure for nursing a premature infant
An ambulances that the Ngao Hospital uses to transport the infants to the tertiary centers. Trips can take up to 4 hours.
Demonstrating how the current system is used in the ambulance.
Partnerships
While KMC has been validated by health organizations, we needed to validate our product to make sure it is effective in incubating infants. To do this, we partnered with the Public Health Department at UC Berkeley and established a testing framework to validate efficacy.
By May 2014, we had set up partnerships with manufacturers to produce the IncuPack at low production scales for controlled implementation. We recently became fellows at the Resolution Project and through their seed funding, we set up tooling for manufacturing as testing.
The Kanga Kare team becoming fellows at the Resolution Project (along with 21 other teams).
