Please close your eyes, and open your hands. Now imagine what you could place in your hands: an apple, maybe your wallet. Now open your eyes. What about a life?
Pechade os ollos e abride as mans. Imaxinade o que collería nelas: unha mazá, quizais a carteira... Abride os ollos. E unha vida?
What you see here is a premature baby. He looks like he's resting peacefully, but in fact he's struggling to stay alive because he can't regulate his own body temperature. This baby is so tiny he doesn't have enough fat on his body to stay warm. Sadly, 20 million babies like this are born every year around the world. Four million of these babies die annually.
O que vedes é un bebé prematuro. Parece que descansa tranquilamente, mais loita pola súa vida porque non pode regular a temperatura corporal. É tan pequeno que non ten graxa dabondo para manter a calor. Por desgraza, 20 millóns destes bebés nacen cada ano en todo o mundo. Catro millóns deles morren cada ano.
But the bigger problem is that the ones who do survive grow up with severe, long-term health problems. The reason is because in the first month of a baby's life, its only job is to grow. If it's battling hypothermia, its organs can't develop normally, resulting in a range of health problems from diabetes, to heart disease, to low I.Q. Imagine: Many of these problems could be prevented if these babies were just kept warm.
O maior problema é que os que sobreviven medran con graves problemas de saúde a longo prazo. Isto débese a que no primeiro mes da vida humana, á única tarefa é medrar. Se combate a hipotermia, os órganos non se poden desenvolver e así xorden unha variedade de problemas como a diabetes, doenzas cardíacas ou un coeficiente intelectual baixo. Imaxinade que moitos destes problemas puidesen evitarse se mantivésemos a estes bebés quentes.
That is the primary function of an incubator. But traditional incubators require electricity and cost up to 20 thousand dollars. So, you're not going to find them in rural areas of developing countries. As a result, parents resort to local solutions like tying hot water bottles around their babies' bodies, or placing them under light bulbs like the ones you see here -- methods that are both ineffective and unsafe. I've seen this firsthand over and over again.
Esa é a función principal da incubadora, mais a tradicional precisa electricidade e custa ata 20 mil dólares. Nas zonas rurais dos países en vías de desenvolvemento non as teñen. Entón, os pais recorren a solucións locais como rodear os bebés con bolsas de auga quente ou colocalos baixo lámpadas coma estas... Estes métodos non son eficaces nin seguros. Puiden velo unha chea de veces.
On one of my first trips to India, I met this young woman, Sevitha, who had just given birth to a tiny premature baby, Rani. She took her baby to the nearest village clinic, and the doctor advised her to take Rani to a city hospital so she could be placed in an incubator. But that hospital was over four hours away, and Sevitha didn't have the means to get there, so her baby died.
Nunha das primeiras viaxes á India, coñecín a Sevitha, unha moza que dera a luz a Rani, un bebé prematuro e diminuto. Levouno á clínica da vila máis próxima e o doutor aconsellou levalo ao hospital da cidade para metelo na incubadora. Pero este hospital quedaba a 4 horas e Sevitha non tiña os medios para ir, así que o seu bebé morreu.
Inspired by this story, and dozens of other similar stories like this, my team and I realized what was needed was a local solution, something that could work without electricity, that was simple enough for a mother or a midwife to use, given that the majority of births still take place in the home. We needed something that was portable, something that could be sterilized and reused across multiple babies and something ultra-low-cost, compared to the 20,000 dollars that an incubator in the U.S. costs.
Inspirados por esta historia e por moitas outras similares, o meu equipo decatouse de que se precisaba unha solución local, algo que funcionase sen electricidade, doado de usar para unha nai ou comadroa, xa que moitos bebés continúan nacendo nas casas. Algo que fose portátil, que puidese esterilizarse e reutilizarse, e de moi baixo custo comparado cos 20 mil dólares que unha incubadora custa nos EE. UU.
So, this is what we came up with. What you see here looks nothing like an incubator. It looks like a small sleeping bag for a baby. You can open it up completely. It's waterproof. There's no seams inside so you can sterilize it very easily. But the magic is in this pouch of wax. This is a phase-change material. It's a wax-like substance with a melting point of human body temperature, 37 degrees Celsius. You can melt this simply using hot water and then when it melts it's able to maintain one constant temperature for four to six hours at a time, after which you simply reheat the pouch. So, you then place it into this little pocket back here, and it creates a warm micro-environment for the baby.
E isto é o que creamos. Nada que ver cunha incubadora, parece un saco de durmir, podes abrilo de todo, é impermeable, non ten costuras, así que é doado de esterilizar. Pero o truco está nesta bolsa de cera. É un material que cambia de fase. A substancia é parecida á cera e derrete aos 37 ºC, a temperatura corporal humana. Derrete con auga quente e unha vez derretida mantén unha temperatura constante durante 4 ou 6 horas e despois volves quentar a bolsa. Colócala neste peto traseiro e crea un microclima cálido para o bebé.
Looks simple, but we've reiterated this dozens of times by going into the field to talk to doctors, moms and clinicians to ensure that this really meets the needs of the local communities. We plan to launch this product in India in 2010, and the target price point will be 25 dollars, less than 0.1 percent of the cost of a traditional incubator.
Parece sinxelo pero repetímolo moitas veces. Falamos con doutores, nais e médicos clínicos para cumprir as necesidades das comunidades locais. Queremos presentalo na India en 2010 e o prezo é de 25 dólares, menos do 0,1% do custo dunha incubadora tradicional.
Over the next five years we hope to save the lives of almost a million babies. But the longer-term social impact is a reduction in population growth. This seems counterintuitive, but turns out that as infant mortality is reduced, population sizes also decrease, because parents don't need to anticipate that their babies are going to die. We hope that the Embrace infant warmer and other simple innovations like this represent a new trend for the future of technology: simple, localized, affordable solutions that have the potential to make huge social impact.
En 5 anos esperamos salvar as vidas de case un millón de bebés. O impacto a longo prazo é a redución do crecemento demográfico. Parece contraditorio pero ao reducir a mortalidade infantil, tamén diminúe a poboación, xa que os pais non teñen que prever que os seus bebés van morrer. Esperamos que o quentador Aperta e outras innovacións parecidas creen tendencia no futuro da tecnoloxía: solucións doadas, adaptadas e accesibles que teñan un efecto enorme na sociedade.
In designing this we followed a few basic principles. We really tried to understand the end user, in this case, people like Sevitha. We tried to understand the root of the problem rather than being biased by what already exists. And then we thought of the most simple solution we could to address this problem. In doing this, I believe we can truly bring technology to the masses. And we can save millions of lives through the simple warmth of an Embrace.
Para o deseño seguimos uns principios básicos: tratamos de entender ao usuario final, neste caso, xente como Sevitha, tratamos de entender a raíz do problema e non condicionarnos polo que xa existe, e logo pensamos na solución máis sinxela para abordar este problema. Coido que realmente podemos achegar a tecnoloxía ás masas. E podemos salvar millóns de vidas grazas á calor dunha Aperta.