The Embrace: Portable Incubator

In developing countries, mortality for 20 million premature and low-birth-weight babies each year is particularly high because incubators are extremely rare.  The Embrace team began their need finding in Kathmandu, the capital city of Nepal. After spending several days observing the neonatal unit of the Kathmandu hospital, Stanford design students with the Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability program asked to be taken outside the city to see how premature infants were cared for in rural areas. They learned two alarming things: First, the overwhelming majority of all premature Nepalese infants were born in these rural areas. And second, most of these infants would never make it to a hospital. They realized that no matter how good their design for a new incubator was, it would never help these babies if it stayed in a hospital. To save the maximum number of lives, their design would have to function in a rural environment. It would have to work without electricity and be transportable, intuitive, sanitizable, culturally appropriate, and perhaps most importantly—inexpensive. By the end of class, the team had created their first prototype of the Embrace Incubator. The design looked something like a sleeping bag. It wrapped around a premature infant, and a pouch of phase-change material (PCM) kept the baby’s body at exactly the right temperature—and maintained this temperature for up to four hours. After four hours, the PCM pouch could be “recharged” by submerging it in boiling water for a few minutes. The Embrace Incubator is small and light, making it easy and inexpensive to transport to rural villages. The entire sleeping bag can be sanitized in boiling water. It is far more intuitive to use than traditional incubators, and fits well into the recommended practice of “Kangaroo Care”, where a mother holds her baby against her skin. Finally, compared to the $20,000 price of a traditional incubator, the Embrace incubator only costs $25.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Life Straw

This one has always been one of my favorites. Basically it is a short tube or “straw” on a necklace that effectively removes all bacteria and viruses from an available water source. This was an invention of Vestergaard Frandsen, a European-based international company specializing in complex emergency response and disease control products. It is guided by a unique Humanitarian Entrepreneurship business model, whose “profit for a purpose” approach has turned humanitarian responsibility into its core business. An individual or company can become a Life Straw supplier through their website.

The Q Drum and The Hippo Roller

Both of these ingenious designs are meant to make carrying large amounts of water more efficient. You can make donations to either of the organizations that manufacture and distribute these products through their websites. Check out the great video below for the full story behind the advent of the Q Drum.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Mighty Mitad

Another Stanford design student (they are really blowing my mind right now – there are several more Stanford shout-outs in this post) with the Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability program with the help of engineer Dave Evans visited Ethiopia and found that families spend $20 or more a year buying $4 clay cooking discs called mitads for making the flat injera bread that is a mainstay of their diet. Most mitads break in less than three months. Evans’ innovation: put a steel band around the clay mitad, which enables it to last for years instead of months. The cost of the Mighty Mitad: just $6. An entrepreneur in the Ethiopian city of Awassa is selling the new mitads, and families are using the savings to send their children to school.

Ambulances With Solar Panels

Water Storage System

For most farmers in Myanmar, watering crops is a two-step process. First, the farmer pumps water up from a well into something that can store the water temporarily. Then the farmer uses sprinkler cans to carry the water out to the crops. The water storage device in the middle of this process is often problematic. A hole dug in the ground is the most common solution, but a significant portion of the water seeps out of the bottom of the hole, decreasing productivity. Concrete containers and metal 55-gallon drums are sometimes used to prevent leakage, but are expensive.  Another amazing student team at Stanford found inspiration in an unlikely place: origami. They studied how origami artists can fold up a flat sheet of material into a three-dimensional shape, and realized that they could do the same with a flat sheet of tarp material. What’s the advantage of folding rather than cutting and pasting? There are no seams-which are the first things to leak and degrade in a water device. Eventually, the team came up with a rectangular container that could hold 120 gallons of water, without any seams, for under $5. They also demonstrated that this water storage device, the “InfiniCan” could be raised several feet off the ground, providing a farmer with enough gravity pressure to water plants through a hose.

Solar-Powered Refrigerator

Promethean Power Systems of Cambridge, Mass. has developed a solar-powered off-grid refrigeration system for chilling milk where there is unreliable electricity. The plan: rural dairy farmers in India store milk in the cooler’s 500-liter tank. Dairy plants can then pick up the milk every other day instead of twice daily. The innovation is in the design of low-cost heat exchangers. Promethean built a working prototype in Boston last year and has received its first order from a large dairy in India. It costs around $9,000 but will save the dairy money because of reduced transportation costs and reduced spoilage.

Rocket Box Stove

Xela Teco, a small manufacturer in Guatemala, worked with the Boston-based nonprofit Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group to develop a better design for a wood burning stove that uses 50% less wood and funnels the smoke out of the home through a chimney. It sells for around $110; the payback on the stove is about one year, since it can cut in half the average $25 families spend per month for wood.

Solar-Powered Off-Grid Lights

D.light Design is the brainchild of several students in a Stanford graduate design class (ho-hum, Stanford you rock!!!) . The entrepreneurs created solar-powered LED lights for use in rural areas of India. A small solar panel creates electricity to recharge the battery powering the lights. D.light Design is manufacturing its products inexpensively in China and selling lights in India, Tanzania and 28 other countries that range in price from $10 to $45. The company expects to sell upwards of 1.5 million lights this year.

Love,
Mommy

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In case the link dies, here is the original transcript of article reposted from http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/26/kids_at_work_in_afghanistan?page=0,1:

Afghanistan’s Little Men

by Anna Badkhen - April 26, 2010

Before it dead-ends in a crowded burst of kiosks, pilgrims, and taxicabs at the northern gate of the Blue Mosque, Dasht-e-Shor Street is a motley procession of businesses that constellate by type.

First come the auto body shops, with gauges and hoses and pipes protruding from dark, sooty metal shipping containers. Then the welders, displaying heavy iron gates painted blue and green to ward off evil spirits. Then the bicycle dealers, decked out with rows of well-worn bikes and wheelbarrows (here the street is interrupted by a soccer field behind the wrecked wall of a bombed-out building); then a few small rice pilau and kebab stalls; and, finally, a long white-and-blue stretch of pharmacies.


Somewhere between the welders and the bike dealers, I buy a small box of pomegranate juice from Mahdi.


Mahdi is 11 years old. He has been running the soft drinks stall on Dasht-e-Shor for his uncle since he was seven. At first, the work was part-time, but after he graduated 4th grade he quit school to become a full-time street vendor.


Mahdi rolls up the metal blinds of the shop at 6:30 in the morning; he closes at seven or eight at night. The uncle is usually there to help open and lock up the store, but generally, Mahdi is on his own. How much does he earn for his work? I ask. Mahdi counts my change and juts out his chin in proud indignation.


“He is my uncle!” the boy says. “It would be totally embarrassing to take money from him.”


The child mortality rate in Afghanistan is second only to Sierra Leone’s. More than 2 million Afghan children are orphans. Children are also the casualties of the war over Afghanistan’s modernization: Last weekend, someone pumped poison gas into two schools for girls in Kunduz, poisoning scores of students.


Despite the billions of international aid dollars funneled into Afghanistan since 2001, the country is weighed down by crushing poverty — a burden that falls heavily on children. The United Nations estimates that one-third of Afghanistan’s children under 14 work. Drive out of any city in any direction, and you will see children as young as seven herding livestock, tilling fields, leveling dirt roads. Peek inside the shops of Dasht-e-Shor Street: Half of the workforce on this grimy boulevard appears to be children. There are child welders, child carpenters, child auto mechanics, child haulers of bags of cement, child shredders of carrots for someone else’s pilau.
There are no child pharmacists. A child cannot be trusted with something so delicate as medicine. Especially if he hasn’t finished elementary school.


Walk south on Dasht-e-Shor, toward the cyanic mosque thought to enshrine the remains of both Imam Ali and Zoroaster. Several blocks before the mosque, take a right on Mandawi Street, toward the main bazaar, and, if you are in the mood, pick up some cottage cheese from Hasan. He is the kid in the canary yellow T-shirt emblazoned with the words TOM AND JERRY and AIR HERO COME. He buys his cottage cheese from a wholesaler down the street and sells it at a very slight markup that will set you back a penny or two.

But on to the homemade recipe!

Organic Brown Sugar Scrub

8 oz Organic Brown Sugar

8 oz Sugar Cane Extract

8 oz Coconut Oil

6 oz Sweet Almond Oil

2 oz Raw Organic Honey

*Bonus Ingredient* 1 oz Liquid Vitamin E (the Sweet Almond Oil has a component of Vitamin E in it, but for an added vitamin boost ad another ounce)

Mix the two dry ingredients, the Brown Sugar and the Sugar Cane Extract in a bowl large enough to contain all of the ingredents.

Melt the Coconut Oil in the microwave and pour over the sugars.

Fold in the rest of the liquids and portion into a sealable container.

“…I am pretty sure only three of their beans; Estima, Rwanda, and Peru are fair trade. To be sure look for the fair trade certified label.  If I am correct every store is supposed be always selling at least one type of fair trade beans.  Also, in most stores you can now have them brew a single cup of whatever coffee you prefer, so ask for fair trade coffee every time!”

On the reconrd, I have only found that the “Estima” coffee is fair trade. I have yet to see anything in print on the Starbuck’s website or in thier stores that has more than the one type. Oh, and irony of ironies, the much-hyped Product Red Starubuck’s coffee which donates $1 to AIDS relief in Africa is not fair trade either. I think that is the definition of filling a bucket with a hole in it. I am INSPI(RED) to go feed some homeless people with my famous condor omelets.

At the grocery store the other day I was blown away by how many certified fair trade options there were (but none were Starubucks, mind you). I have to give a special shout out to Newman’s Own who ONLY offered Fair Trade and Organic options at the exact same price as the rest of the coffees! Newman’s Own has been around for years but I am really only beginning to appreciate all of their food offerings. It appears as though they have been a responsible company since before being green was cool!

Here is a link to some awesome Newman’s Own Organics coupons.

My baby just hit the three month mark and it is an unfathomable expense to provide for one of his two most essential needs. Before my baby was born and I was feeling totally overwhelemed with the strollers and toys and facts and figures that make every expectant mother manic a friend and seasoned mom told me, “Don’t worry, all you need is boobs and diapers.”  That one sentence became my calming mantra over the last trimester of my pregnancy. Boobs and diapers. Simple, right?

Sadly, as I have started to donate my kiddo’s outgrown newborn clothing to local charities here in Los Angeles I am coming to realize that diapers are a luxury item for needy moms. According to LADiaperdrive.com a newborn baby goes through about twelve diapers a day at a cost of about $100 per month. Lower income families may keep babies in the same diaper all day to cut costs which can have a huge impact on a baby’s health or use money that would have otherwise gone to food on keeping a baby properly diapered. I accidentally stumbled onto a picture of a yeast diaper rash caused by infrequent diaper changes which was terrifyingly unpretty. It is really sad to imagine a little kid with that such a painful preventable ailment. You can see the image here on About.com. WARNING! It is extremely graphic and features unclothed male infant diaper area. Very NSFW.

Cloth diapers aren’t a feasible option for these moms as they usually do not own washing machines and a diaper washing service adds a steep cost. Furthermore, the environmental impact of the water used to wash cloth diapers in areas such as California with long term water shortages can be an overlooked environmental hazard.

Eco-friendly disposables are a good option but are still more costly than regular disposables by several cents per diaper. Donating eco-friendly disposables to mothers in need is great for baby, mom and mother earth. 1,000 diapers would fill the needs of three newborns for one month and would be 1,000 less diapers sitting in a landfill for 500 years!

I will be posting details on how and where to donate on Monday. I will also be posting links to diaper chariaties across the country that you can donate to. I have already written one article with some of this information which can be accessed here.

Thinking it is worth a second look I go in for a closer inspection:

Okay. Nice little sticker ya’ got there bottle! Then I happen to glance at the bottom:

Uhhh. Okay so why put the “colored decorations” on to begin with? I need colored decorations a lot less than I need a baby with a birth defect, so I passed on the water bottle.

Suspicious that this might just be some hippy-dippy overprotection I looked up Prop 65 when I got home. If you are curious you can read the whole story here on the CA Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment’s website, but basically in the 80’s prop 65 was passed which requires businesses to post a hazard label on items that have specific chemicals in them that are know to cause birth defects. The three top offenders are BROMOCHLOROACETIC ACID (the garbagy byproduct of water purification), CUMENE (a flammable component of crude oil) AND DICLOFOP-METHYL (the main component of most weed killers) but a more comprehensive list of every chemical Prop 65 includes can be downloaded here.

No telling which one is in the blue paint on the bottle. My money is on Cumene, but who knows? Who cares is more like it. They all sound awful. The more I thought about the Prop 65 warning lable the more I saw it everywhere.

This was in the parking garage at the Century City Mall in Los Angeles:

I have no idea what “Title 22, Division 2 means”. I asked Mr. Google and he gave me a bunch of 100+ page PDF documents that looked like xeroxes of faxes typed on a dot matrix printer. But I am tired and might give it another go if I really care that much about it tomorrow.

Now that I am already on my soap box I think I’ll take the opportunity to gripe about one more thing before shuffling off to bed. Reading all of these warnings (and there were about a dozen more that I didn’t add photos of but might save for a slow news day in the future) I appreciate the California bureaucracy just a smidge despite the bad wrap it is getting lately. Yes we may be bankrupt but at least they have the decency to spring for stickers on things that are going to kill me or my kid. I guess they are just really overpriced? Seriously though, my complaint is that I’d like to think I am at least of average intelligence and I know I have a lot of time on my hands (Exitbit A: this blog) and yet I am having a hard time finding the heart of what these warnings mean despite being smarter than the average bear, with more time than the average sloth and more interest than the average curious cat. Wow, I AM really tired.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is the sceond segment from the Martha Stewart Show on 4/2 that I found extreemely helpful. It features Traci Torres founder of of MyPetChicken.com. In the clip she goes into more depth about how to get started and mentions that her company offers an affordable chicken starter package under $70 that has everything (including chickens) a newbie city chicken farmer needs to get started. Most notably MyChicken.com can ship chickens in groups of 25 or less which most hatcheries will not.

I am already fantasizing about showing up to all of my high profile dinner parties (that will surly exist by the time I have chicken-laying hens) with a basket of exotic looking shades of speckled eggs much to the delight and envy of all of my contemporaries.

In my quest for more information about chicken rearing I found some interesting articles including this one, which thanks to my bad speed reading skills, I thought was entitled “Sexting* Baby Chickens”. Which I thought was a clever title for possibly some sort of sweet talking your chickens to get them to lay more eggs. In actuality it is entitled “Sexing Baby Chickens” and is about one hatcher’s method for determining hen or rooster. Which got me to thinking, I ONLY want hens. I have no need for fertilized eggs or a 5 am alarm clock that I can’t unplug. Note to self: find a way of only getting lady birds. The entire site: fowlvisions.com is pretty great and goes into some advanced details on raising happy chicks, even if they aren’t sexting them.

Cluck cluck cluck.

* Don’t know what “Sexting” is? Then you don’t have a teenager.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For more information on the McMurray Hatchery click here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

First of all, I am going to put the disclaimer on this video that I am not responsible for the messed up aspect ratio. That is YouTube’s fault. I got this video in an email several weeks ago. I think it is a real testament to what one person can do for a cause that they care about. Secondly, I  don’t have a lawn but this stuff is crazy town. Daily I think to myself, “Here is another thing that in fifty years will go the way of the lobotomy and lead paint.”

For more info on this movie click here.

“Oh tomato-ketchup? I know that one.”