We can’t wait to expand to Africa and help rural villages. Charcoal stoves to heat babies?!?! Oh no =(
I recently returned from Uganda where I was caring for a premature baby with no incubator or way of warming him other than a small space heater in the hospital. He came from an extremely poor village called Masese where there are a high number of premature babies born each year. A few days ago I found out that the baby passed away. The town that I was working in has no incubators. The main hospital uses charcoal stoves to heat babies. Now that I am back in the US I am working to provide a way for the voluteers that are there in Masese to help care for these babies. Right now, my primary concern in their body temperature. In my research for a sustainable way to heat infants, I came across your organization. I would like to hear more about your product and if it is something that could be availble to provide for this community. Thank you,Jenny
Posted by Rahul Panicker
Mon, 22 Mar 2010 09:00:00 GMT
I was hoping to see a tiger. But the only indication that we were in a tiger reserve was a huge sign welcoming us to Achanakmar Tiger Reserve. We were in the heart of Chattisgarh, about three hours outside Bilaspur. Our destination - Bamni, a tribal village a few kilometers within the sanctuary. Navigable roads were hard enough to come by, let alone electricity. So you can imagine our surprise when Komal and Elyse spotted a mud hut with a satellite dish antenna sticking out.
I ask our driver to stop the jeep, and go poke around. ‘Koi ho?’ (Anyone home?). A boy, about 13 years of age, steps out. Golu looks at me just as curiously as I look at the antenna. I peer into the courtyard and spy a few solar panels laid out, charging some LED lanterns. Golu proceeds to explain to me that the government provided these lights and panels. I press further. Surely, the government didn’t also give them a satellite dish? Nope. That’s them. So, they have a TV? Yes, it’s inside. Golu invites me in. It’s mid day, and the house is pretty dark. But I see a truck battery charging. Great. But I don’t see any more gadgetry around. The engineer in me is curious - something doesn’t add up.
You see, a truck battery puts out 12 volts DC. A TV needs 220V AC (what you get in the mains). Most homes that have battery backups manage this conversion with a device called an inverter. It costs a few thousand rupees. I don’t see anything of that sort here. Instead of asking more questions, I ask Golu if he could set up the TV. Of course, happy to. Out comes a 15 inch TV. Black and white. There are wires dangling from the back side, and Golu proceeds to hook it up to the battery. I’m still puzzled. Where’s the inverter?? I peer at the backside of the TV. What I saw was sheer brilliance! The TV’s entire internal power supply unit had been ripped out, and in its place was a hole with two wires coming out.
What does the power supply unit of the TV do? It takes power from the mains and converts it to a level appropriate for the TV’s electronics. Which is what? 12V DC. So, instead of converting DC from the battery to AC with an inverter, and converting back to DC with the TV’s power supply, they’d just bypassed the whole process. Brilliant.
And as I’m still taking this in, he brings out a speaker system. And a VCD player. Gingerly ties together the wires, carefully matching polarity. And pops in a VCD of ‘Karan Arjun’, a Bollywood block buster starring both Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan. A black and white image appears on screen with the duo dancing in a quarry, music blaring. All of sudden, heads appear near the courtyard. ‘Cinema?’. Neighbors streaming in for the film show. My economist friend was right. TV clearly is a public good.
Another example of the famous Indian Jugaad. Another engineer in the making. Incredible India.
The concept of personal space in India is much different than the USA. Crowds stand closer. People are more at ease with touching each other and this leads to different expectations in commercial environments.
Shoppers sometimes want to be crowded in. Many shops have to provide direct access to the product, because their customers won’t be comfortable buying a product unless they can touch and hold it first and there is a crowd of other people doing the same. It may be important for our product to be touchable before it’s sold.
So, what is the “butt brush test”? When designing shopping space or any shared public space (restaurants, lobbies, bookstores, grocery stores, etc) for a Western audience, the butt brush test is a quick evaluation tool used to check that two people could pass one another back-to-back in the aisles without bumping into each other. Thanks to the folks at Idiom here in Bangalore for introducing me to this concept.
How does the target market’s perception of personal space affect your product design? Marketing? Point-of-sale design?
Back in the States we have had a poster presentation in Stanford giving us the opportunity to have our data peer reviewed AND (drum roll!) we have put our first 2 babies in our product to be warmed!
Our first baby girl was born on the 4th of March at 9:45am, and our second baby, also a girl, was born the next morning. The pictures below are proudly hung on our office walls. Depending on the frequency of births, we hope to have put ten babies in our product by the end of this month, and eventually an additional 50 babies for the purpose of this feedback study.
Our pride and joy in this progress stands in stark contrast to the frustrations we feel at our current inability to assist in instances of widespread and urgent need. The earthquake in Haiti still has severe effects till today, and it kills us to read stories such as these from doctors on the ground in Haiti where we KNOW that if we had a ready and tested product, we would be of tremendous value to needy families and save lives. But the fact of the matter is that while we have a technology that the Embrace team has personal confidence in, the product remains clinically untested. Doctors we have contacted in Haiti concur with us that despite the obvious need, now is not the time in Haiti to be experimenting with an untested infant warmer, no matter its potential.
If we went ahead anyway and put our product on the ground in Haiti would we be helping and serving babies in need? Yes we believe so. But for a delicate case like Haiti we will only move if we can do so in a way that is thoroughly responsible and in a way that we can guarantee the safety of babies put in our product.
As an organization we have a deeper duty to the bigger picture. Four million newborns die every year, one million in India alone, mostly from preventable or treatable causes. This is the problem that we are seeking to address, and we hope that the logic of this rationale allows us to make the choices and decisions that are right by those who need us the most, regardless the sick feeling we have when the pictures and e-mail from Haiti come streaming in.
You see, a truck battery puts out 12 volts DC. A TV needs 220V AC (what you get in the mains). Most homes that have battery backups manage this conversion with a device called an inverter. It costs a few thousand rupees. I don’t see anything of that sort here. Instead of asking more questions, I ask Golu if he could set up the TV. Of course, happy to. Out comes a 15 inch TV. Black and white. There are wires dangling from the back side, and Golu proceeds to hook it up to the battery. I’m still puzzled. Where’s the inverter?? I peer at the backside of the TV. What I saw was sheer brilliance! The TV’s entire internal power supply unit had been ripped out, and in its place was a hole with two wires coming out.
And as I’m still taking this in, he brings out a speaker system. And a VCD player. Gingerly ties together the wires, carefully matching polarity. And pops in a VCD of ‘Karan Arjun’, a Bollywood block buster starring both Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan. A black and white image appears on screen with the duo dancing in a quarry, music blaring. All of sudden, heads appear near the courtyard. ‘Cinema?’. Neighbors streaming in for the film show. My economist friend was right. TV clearly is a public good.
