8/25/2023 0 Comments State of survival incubator tips![]() In the end, however, the team couldn’t let the project die. And one of the original team members, who had recently become a father, decided he couldn’t continue to commit to the project full-time. Jane was fielding job opportunities as she finished her MBA. Both Rahul and Linus had already started working at promising tech startups. They could have stopped with a working prototype. ![]() In this instance, prototyping with end users in the field led to an improvement that may make the difference between life and death.Īt the end of the class, the students faced a hard decision about what to do next. Now, when the baby warmer reaches the correct temperature, an indicator simply changes to “OK,” so there is no numeric value for parents to second-guess. But the Embrace team just iterated the design. Traditional engineers might have blamed this on random “user error” and moved on. So if you ask me to heat it to thirty-seven, just to be safe I would heat it only to thirty or so.” Alarm bells went off in Rahul’s head. So if the doctor prescribed one teaspoon of medicine for her baby, she told Rahul, “I give him just half a teaspoon. One of the village mothers explained that in her community they believed Western medicines were really powerful, and often too strong. At that time, the prototype had a built-in temperature indicator, like the LCD thermometer on a fish tank or a fever strip that indicates a child’s body temperature.When Rahul told the moms to warm the heating pouch to thirty-seven degrees Celsius to help regulate the baby’s temperature, he got a surprising and unsettling response. For example, one day Rahul was in a small town in Maharashtra state showing the prototype to a group of moms. Along the way, they discovered factors they could never have found if they had stayed at home in Silicon Valley. They took the prototype to India, where they sought to understand the cultural nuances that could lead mothers to accept or reject the device. Family needs back in the village meant that premature babies were taken home again after five or six days, even if they should have stayed in an incubator for weeks. And even if a new mother felt well enough to travel and had the family support she needed to maintain constant skin-to-skin contact with a premature baby en route to the hospital, she was still unlikely to leave her newborn in treatment. No matter how inexpensive or well designed the incubator, life-and-death battles were being fought in the mother’s home, not the hospital. Many of the hospital’s incubators were going unused because the babies who needed them were often born in villages thirty miles away. Why were so many incubators empty if premature babies in the region needed them to survive? A doctor explained the sad, simple truth. Linus was visiting a modern urban hospital in Nepal when he noticed something odd: Many of the hospital’s donated incubators were empty. ![]() What he saw there challenged his preconceived ideas and sparked creative insights that led to an innovative solution. Instead, computer science team member Linus Liang got funding for a trip to Nepal in order to more deeply understand firsthand the unmet needs associated with incubators. Research done, right? And yet, one of the central principles of human-centered design is that you “empathize with the end user.” Skipping that fundamental approach to innovation wasn’t really an option. An obvious solution arose: the team could systematically reduce the cost of existing incubator designs by eliminating parts and using cheaper materials.
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