Tuesday, December 16, 2008
For the New York Times article “Looking Under the Hood and Seeing an Incubator,” journalist Madeline Drexler focuses on the work of Jonathan Rosen, Executive Director of the Institute for Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization (ITEC) at Boston University School of Management. Drexler explains:
The creators of the car parts incubator — a project being promoted by the Global Health Initiative at the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology, or Cimit, a nonprofit consortium of Boston teaching hospitals and engineering schools — say it could prevent millions of newborn deaths in the developing world....In truth, experts say, the developing world doesn’t need more incubators. It needs incubators that work. Over the years, thousands have been donated from rich nations, only to end up in “incubator graveyards” — most broken, some never opened….
To compensate for this philanthropic shortsightedness, medical staffs either crank up the temperature in “incubator rooms” to 100 degrees or more, or swaddle babies in plastic to hold in body heat.
Such makeshift solutions led the Boston team to ask: How can we make an incubator for the developing world that will get fixed?
One person pondering that question in 2006 was Jonathan Rosen, then director of Cimit’s technology implementation program. A proponent of sustainable biomedical technology, Dr. Rosen, now at the Boston University School of Management, uses the term “organic resourcing” to describe the principle of fashioning medical devices from whatever materials were locally abundant.
In his discussions with doctors who practice in impoverished settings, Dr. Rosen learned that no matter how remote the locale, there always seemed to be a Toyota 4Runner in working order.
It was his “Aha!” moment, he recalled later: Why not make the incubator out of new or used car parts, and teach local auto mechanics to be medical technologists?
Cimit then hired Design That Matters, a nonprofit firm in Cambridge, Mass., to design the machine. “The idea was to start with a 4Runner,” said Timothy Prestero, the firm’s founder and chief executive, “and take away all the parts that weren’t an incubator.”
What resulted was a serious-looking gray-blue device that conjures up a cyborg baby buggy, but fits comfortably in hospitals and clinics with few resources.
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