An inflatable incubator for babies born prematurely, costing a fraction of the price of traditional incubators, is the recipient of this year's James Dyson Award.
The recognition celebrates the ingenuity of young designers on a global platform and offers a cash prize of $45,000 to the winning designer or team of designers.
This year, the award goes to James Roberts, a graduate of Loughborough University, for the MOM incubator.
Roberts revealed that he started to work on MOM after drawing inspiration from a TV documentary that showed the plight of Syrian refugees and their children. The documentary revealed that there was a significant number of babies being born prematurely, and that these babies were met with death as an effect of the stress of war and because of the lack of proper incubators to support the lives of the babies.
"I thought there has to be a way to solve that," Roberts said.
With the prize money from winning the James Dyson Award, Roberts is now looking to bring the MOM incubator to the market by the year 2017, with Roberts hoping that the equipment will be used in the near future in developing countries.
The design of the MOM incubator allows it to be delivered with components packed flatly and then assembled once it reaches its destination. The incubator utilizes a plastic sheet that contains inflatable transparent panels, which are manually blown up and heated by a component made of ceramic.
The plastic sheet is wrapped around the interior of the incubator, which will keep the baby warm.
Roberts said that once the incubator is fully assembled, it will be able to maintain its shape and not collapse on the baby.
Temperature and humidification within the incubator is controlled by an Arduino computer, along with a phototherapy lamp that can be utilized for jaundice treatment.
The incubator is also designed to be a low-power device, allowing it to be run by a car battery for over 24 hours if stable electricity is unavailable.
Once it has served its purpose, the MOM incubator can then be sterilized and then disassembled back into a flat package, ready to be transported again to where it is needed.
Roberts estimates that the prototype for the MOM incubator costs $400 to produce, compared to the modern incubators that cost nearly $50,000 each.
"It takes out everything that is unnecessary," Roberts said. "For example, some incubators contain weighing scales. That's useful -- but not necessary in the refugee camp scenario. The inflatable material is very inexpensive, and I use simple computer fans and ceramic heaters rather than more expensive components."
