Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Build Neonatal Incubator From Car Parts
Peace Corps Online writes "The NYTimes ran a story this week about a group of scientists who have built a neonatal incubator out of automobile parts, including a pair of headlights as a heat source, a car door alarm to signal emergencies, and an auto air filter and fan to provide climate control. The creators of the car-parts incubator say that an incubator found in any neonatal intensive care unit in the US could cost around $40,000, but the incubator they have developed can be built for less than $1,000. One expert says as many as 1.8 million infants might be spared every year if they could spend just a week in the units, which help babies who are born early or at low birth weights regulate their body temperature until their organs fully develop. Experts say in developing countries where infant mortality is most common, high-tech machines donated by richer nations often conk out when the electricity fizzles or is restricted to conserve power. 'The future medical technologists in the developing world,' says Robert Malkin, director of Engineering World Health, 'are the current car mechanics, HVAC repairmen, bicycle shop repairmen. There is no other good source of technology-savvy individuals to take up the future of medical device repair and maintenance.'"
A use for all those cars we Americans won't buy now! We can bail out Detroit and save babies at the same time.
It's a reminder of what can be done with old-fashioned, low-tech stuff, and that breakthroughs can remain a down-and-dirty job and you don't need millions of dollars in funding to get one.
I work at Children's Mercy Hospital and Clinics in the ICN and I can tell you from first hand every day experience that creating affordable incubators that can be brought into lesser hospitals would dramatically help what is an increasingly high premature birth rate here in the Midwest.
Sounds to me like this is a statement more of price gouging on medical equipment more than the ingenuity of the scientists (not to belittle their effort).
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Well, at least those kids get a good start..
Um, the problem isn't a lack of repairmen Mr Malkin - it's a lack of electricity. A problem which this incubator doesn't fix. (No, the motorcycle battery isn't a fix. It's a backup. With no electricity, this incubator dies just as dead as a high tech one.)
Thats sarcasm right?... cause, you know with stuff like...
Police have seized more than 25,000 cars in Greater Manchester since new powers to tackle rogue drivers were introduced last year.
More than 10,000 have been crushed.
And thats in "Greater" Manchester alone, which is about 3 million people or so... and that doesnt include just normally scrapped vehicles, or accidents.
Calculate that for various other locations in the world.
Ever been to a junk yard? I have many times. In fact, you can even do it online.
http://www.pickyourpart.com/
Life is not for the lazy.
A slashdot story that cries out for a car analogy.
My daughter was born 7 weeks premature and spent 2 weeks in an incubator. As a side effect of spending so much time with her in the neonatal unit, I got to know what every switch and readout on her machine did. It was a very impressive piece of equipment designed to do one thing very well - keep a helpless human alive.
I would hazard a guess as to say that the insides of the machine are built with all sorts of hardware redundancy checks inside to ensure that its critical mission is carried out no matter what (I'm pretty sure it even had a UPS); which probably contributes somewhat to the high cost. That and the liability aspect inherent with any machine that keeps humans alive (from auto-respirators to space-suits).
I am fortunate enough to live in a country with a high standard of health care, and my daughter's stay in her expensive machine saved her life; however if a lower cost alternative that does the core functions of the expensive machines can be built for countries that are not as well off as we are, I am all for that. Expensive machines are also expensive to maintain, and if the TCO can be lowered to the point that poorer countries can operate them comfortably, that's got to be a benefit. It just goes to show that ingenuity knows no bounds.
"And then I visited Wikipedia
This gives me hope.
Some day, someone will find a way of creating a computer from wood and stone. And then I won't feel inferior to car mechanics because of my uselesness in a post-apocalyptic scenario.
(Yes, I know a car is more useful than a computer in the first months, but years of gaming must have prepared me for fending the radioactive zombies till a new order is established.)
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=rxfzm9dfqBw :D
too bad it couldnt be made out of neonatal incubator parts instead.
... and probably forty grand for costs of FDA compliance.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
After being laid off from the high-tech industry a few years back, I ended up working as a maintenance man at a large retirement facility. Our facility includes independent living, assisted living, and full-time managed care.
Since we're a not-for profit facility, there's a lot of incentive to do things in a cost effective manner, but at the same time, safety and well being of our residents is paramount. I've found myself having to repair all manner of medical equipment with little or no help from the manufacturer or seller. Things as simple as wheelchairs and walkers, to moderately complex like lift chairs and adjustable beds, to stuff like oxygen generators and emergency nurse-call equipment.
My employer would never be able to afford vendor reps to fix all this stuff, and so its left to myself and the rest of our small department. I'm the only one with a college education, and the only one from a high-tech background. The other guys have backgrounds in things like HVAC and carpentry. Simply put, the cost of health care equipment has far outstripped the ability for many facilities to support it and still provide affordable care. I was used to working with engineers, programmers, and big budgets until recently. The future of health care is not more tech, but taking the tech we have and making it cheaper and easier to maintain.
Ok cars are expensive outside of the Nanny State then. Here in Amerikkka you can't just take people's cars for speeding or reckless driving.
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
cars are pretty expensive, unless there is a huge supply of broken cars i cant see this panning out.
And a huge care package for extra babies. Call me cold-hearted, but there is a reason that those babies are not surviving. Now that they will survive, there will be even more mouths on each gram of scarce food and more congestion.
1) Save third world babies
2) Have a food crisis
3) Have a population crisis
4) Have a disease crisis
5) ???
6) They die anyway.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I didn't RTFA, but what a lot of commenters seem to be missing is the concept of economy of scale. The great idea here seems to be that using "off the shelf", mass-produced car parts to create an incubator with equal functionality to that of a standard incubator saves a great deal of money. Plus, the car parts have been better tested and are apparently more reliable. So this is kind of like building a software system by combining lots of preexisting, well-tested components rather than custom designing everything in-house.
I can't see it happening.
The medical industry is all about litigation. If you invent something that saves peoples lives, then of the 100 people it saves, there might be someone who dies anyway, because of device failure and you can be sure that some lawyer's already prefilled out the lawsuit against you and is just waiting for an opportunity.
A friend of mine invented a very simply device that measured skin resistance and could be placed over someone's torso (like a blanket) to look for internal bleeding. This isn't just some inventor guy, he works as an engineer in one of Australia's top universities.
As soon as the university lawyers found out it had a medical application, they killed the project.
There's no doubt it would have saved lives, but the sad truth is that the university involved would actually rather see those people die than risk the litigation of being sued if anyone tried to prove that someone actually died of the device if it was somehow misused by a paramedic at the scene of an accident.
And I don't think it's likely to change. There's too much money invested in keeping medicine esoteric and away from everyone else too allow too many companies in to dilute the spend of sick people.
Maybe it's a rant, but it's a sad truth that I beleive. Doctors are pretty much the only people who seem to get away with doing this kind of research but even then I've read of far too many doctors who are persecuted because they came up with some kind of new treatment/device.
I'm guessing that car-parts-incubators is just radical enough to get anyone who tries to market it into trouble. Even if it saved a million livess, it would bring a thousand lawsuits and while I'm sure if some parents saw an infant die because of a lack of incubators, they would say these are needed, but if an infant dies while it's in an incubator, they'll look for someone to blame. Not that commercial units are any more reliable. But what judge is going to beleive that a $1000 unit was just as good as a $40,000 unit?
Please excuse my cynicism. It's just that I've observed this more than a few times.
GrpA.
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
Hey, there is hope after all. They can use car parts from gas guzzler's like hummers. Those should be worthless very soon and the kids will love'em.
Let those Red Staters and their deformed children die.
White trash have been incubating their kids and dogs in sealed cars in parking lots around the world for years.
I record my sleeptalking
I dont see what that has to do with it, do a search for "american junkyard" or "african scrapyard", etc, etc.
There are millions of cars just sitting around all over the world, and stuff like air-conditioning has been around since the 1950's or so, headlights for even longer, etc.
It's not like we need to create an incubator for every baby born or anything either, there's what, 20,000 or so cities in the US? say, 2 incubators per city, thats 40,000, easily do-able, and a savings of about $1,560,000,000 (provided all 40,000 cities needed new incubators, lol)
Everett's Auto Parts ... Everett's recycles over 10,000 cars a year and has more than a thousand cars in stock for you to find just the parts you need. You can even ask us to find those parts for you!...
That single junkyard could do it in about 16 years or so (given that not all vehicles have air-con, working lights, etc), nevermind the other hundreds maybe thousands of other salvage and junkyards in the US, nevermind elsewhere in the world...
You get the idea.
Honestly, i dont really give a damn about the incubators, but the point is its a worthwhile recycling program, plus it uses a relatively small amount of the vehicles, leaving a large amount of other parts that could (should) be used for other things.
They wanted me to build them a neonatal incubator, so I took their plutonium and gave them a shiny casing full of used pinball machine parts!
OK. Drug possession on the other hand...
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Hell, the American Big Three are desperately looking for some good PR, after getting spanked out of Washington. A reformed Rick Wagoner could say, "I've given up taking joy rides in the corporate jet, and am now saving babies."
TFA mentions that they rummage around in junk yards for parts: Detroit probably has butt-loads of new parts that they will never need. The UAW will clean up their image by using volunteers to do the assembly for free.
As soon as they do this, the German auto companies will respond with a better engineered model, and the Japanese with a fuel efficient hybrid.
Oh, remember to disable the airbag before you put the baby in.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
No cold-hearted, just Malthusian. There is talk about how technology has stunted human evolution. Technology has also vastly increased the Earth's ability to support human life far beyond what it would be capable otherwise. I'm still kinda riding the fence on the Neo-Malthusian/Cornucopian debate.
The game.
anyone that thinks these incubators really need to cost 40k USD is crazy. A lot of medical equipment is over billed.
Perhaps we need more tiers of this stuff. maybe most people people don't need the 40k version but there is that one kid a year that will die without it. So buy a bunch of the cheap ones and a couple of the expensive ones. Best of both worlds.
There is a direct correlation between infant mortality and birth rate, across all living things. This is why reptiles or fish have so many offspring at once compared to mammals. In mammals, the parents protect and educate the young, ensuring lower mortality rates, and therefore don't need to produce as many offspring to have the same number of adults. Even within mammals, species that provide less maternal care will have more young more often (i.e. dogs, cats) compared to those that provide more (i.e. dolphins, apes).
Looking at our species the same law naturally applies, and its effects can be clearly seen. If you look at the countries with high birth rates, you will see they are also the ones with high mortality rates. In the short term there will be a population increase but in the long term it will stabilize. The initial increase can (and should) be reduced by providing contraceptives, legalizing abortion, teaching sexual education in schools, and minimizing the influence of religion (if it goes against the first 3). These are things that all modern societies have done, I don't see any reason why others would be unable to do so.
The NYTimes ran a story this week about a group of scientists who have built a neonatal incubator out of automobile parts
I think you have scientist confused with engineer.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Just hook them up to a hamster wheel- the running will keep them warm. Plus it will build their muscles. No need for a muffler, if you get them exposed to all the toxins early enough they will grow up nice and monstrous (good for NBA/NFL ticket sales). And just think how many cars we will be saving from silly reuse when we can encapsulate homeless people in them and then present them to French art critics as "Still Life in Auto".
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Perhaps we can create games that's not only entertaining but challenge the gamers to create things or find solutions that can benefit the society.
If this really works there might even be enough people around to eat all that surplus food that's available in 3rd world countries. Not to mention the water and energy surpluses that we've been trying to get rid of for decades. People even try to dispose of their excess water by flushing it down the toilets in some countries.
872835240
From my experience, I would say yes, there are huge supplies of car parts lying about in developing nations.
Sure, only the small fraction of wealthy people can buy a car, even one heavily used, but what happens to the car when it breaks down beyond all repair? Does the non-existent trash-collection agency come to haul it off to the non-existent recycling facility or proper landfill? Nope, it sits right where it broke down - unless it broke down on the road, then it will be pushed aside just enough for normal traffic to resume. After that, everything that can be removed and hauled off without special equipment will be removed. Fans, engine, alternator, lights, pumps, belts, bits of plastic, body panels, I mean EVERYTHING. All this stuff ends up back at the mechanics, since they are the only people who could get any use out of it. Parts rarely match up exactly, but things get shoe-horned into place and made to work. In a few months or so, if a big flat-bed lorry comes along, what is left of the frame will be hauled off and turned into hand carts.
My single data point: In my small little remote town there are about 4 private cars (1 was a missionary doctor), a couple of government cars, as well as a bus-stop that ran 3 or 4 buses between the nearest towns. The mechanics at the bus stop stand had a large collection of spare parts. I have no idea how many of them were functioning or to what degree they did, but there were piles and piles of all different sorts of parts. I'm sure that with a bit of trial and error, enough working parts could have been pulled out of there to construct something equal to what was in TFA. Even more, there was a shop selling solar panels to charge car batteries for 12v lighting systems. While still quite expensive, a system like this could be set up to be totally independent of unreliable mains.
I know that what passed for the hospital in town did not have an incubator, or regular electricity to run one if they did. I never personally knew anyone there who lost a baby shortly after birth, but I heard of it happening often enough. Something like this could have saved some of those lives.
Now I'm feeling some kind of reverse home-sickness :(
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
Ok cars are expensive outside of the Nanny State then. Here in Amerikkka you can't just take people's cars for speeding or reckless driving.
Here in the Nanny State we have a lot less road deaths.
Most seized cars were uninsured. If you pay the fines you can get the car back, but if you've been banned from driving for a year or two for driving uninsured and your car wasn't worth much anyway it might not be worth it.
But we have more than enough junk car yards. Trust me, you could get the parts needed for cheap. It's the fully functioning new cars that cost money (and even those are pretty cheap right now, thank you Mr. Bush)
---- Liquid was a patriot ----
Perhaps in somewhere with a strong islamic culture, like say Nigeria.
Let us know how that works out for you.
I'm still kinda riding the fence on the Neo-Malthusian/Cornucopian debate.
Why? Here's a question. In the technologically advanced parts of the world, what is their birth rate, especially for people native to that region? Once you've answered that, you'll see why the neo-Malthusian view of the world is broken.
Why not have an OLPC like effort. With the salvage parts, we might even get this one down to $100.
Technology has also vastly increased the Earth's ability to support human life
Unfortunately, it's much worse than that. First, so long as countries have a high birth rate, any technological advance only delays (and magnifies) the coming Malthusian disaster.
Secondly, many of the technological advances are temporary, especially in 3rd world countries, as they depend on cheap oil for mechanisation, fertiliser and pesticides.
The current economic situation has given oil a small reprieve, but the shit will hit the fan some time. It might start with some "unexpected" coincidence of multiple factors: a drought here, a war there, a crop disease somewhere else.
N.America, Australia, Brazil etc suffer a little with reduced exports. China bids high for what remains. Africa starves first, with places like Indonesia and even India not so far behind.
And guess what? There is nothing we can do to stop it, short of mass involuntary sterilisation. Even if all the Americans go vegetarian, banning grain-fed beef and ethanol fuel, it only delays the problem a short time.
Birth rates are the time bomb, and China is the only third world county to be doing anything about it. Mass-starvation (millions of deaths!) is _very_ fresh in their minds.
You can argue over all the variables of crop yields, oil reserves, etc, and it only changes when, not if, mass global food shortages will come.
Almost any medical device or drug can be made dirt cheap if you throw enough safety considerations out of the window.
Or do these guys want to tell me that those $1000 also include R&D (just how many hours did they spend designing it?), biocompatibility testing (I don't think most materials used in cars undergo this by default), electrical/mechanical/chemical hazard analysis, etc.
Also, they're comparing the parts&labor price of their contraption to the list price of an actual incubator. Sorry guys, you fail accounting, big time. The parts&labor cost of the incubator is probably in the sub-$10k range (I wouldn't be surprised if it was very, very close to their $1000, even). The other >$30k are R&D, testing, support, etc, and of course a fat profit.
Now, where those new (OEM) parts, third party parts or did they go to the local junk yard to get parts?
[From a courtroom transcript]
Prosecutor: So according to your earlier testimony, the defendents were travelling in the breakdown lane at a high rate of speed. Am I correct?
Trooper: Yes, that's correct.
Prosecutor: So what happened when you pull them over and approached the operator of the vehicle?
Trooper: The male defendent stated that the female defendent was his wife, and that she was going into labor. I offered to help them after I issued their citation, but they refused.
Prosecutor: They refused? How?
Trooper: I read it on Slashdot about a way to rebuild autoparts into a neonatal unit, and since the defendents were driving a 4Runner I thought I could help them out so they wouldn't continue to break the law.
Prosecutor: So what happened then?
Trooper: They thought I was too smart to be a state trooper, so they both burst out laughing and said that I should get a real job. Then they continued down the breakdown lane at a high rate of speed. That's when I called for backup.
How about Scientists now building BIONIC HUMANS: http://www.95news.com/bionic-humans-top-10-technologies/
who is an uncurable petrolhead. It's like he was born in the engine compartment of an automobile.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
...and this is modified +5? I hope you've elected to avoid any form of surgery or medical attention in your country should you need it, to be even-handed.
I fail to see how making incubators cheaper/more prevalent can be seen as anything other than a good thing. Following your line of logic it'd seem the logical extreme would be bombing continents for the good of the "civilised" western world...
The power could be generated by using humans as an energy source like in The Matrix.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Until you include the insurance against being sued. In America anything medical has to be insured against enormous law suits. It s unrelated to the risk of causing damage to pateints. It is very closely related to the potential profit from lawyers.
And the FA approval orocess could reasonably be expted to add $1,000,000 to the cost of each unit if you are not careful.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I thought the point of using car parts is that they are cheap, easily available, and run on 12 volts (so the device can run without A/C, and be charged by another vehicle).
First, so long as countries have a high birth rate, any technological advance only delays (and magnifies) the coming Malthusian disaster.
True, but when higher technology is actually available, the birth rate drops. This has held true for about 1/3 of the earths population across several cultures.
Secondly, many of the technological advances are temporary, especially in 3rd world countries, as they depend on cheap oil for mechanisation, fertiliser and pesticides.
Right, in the long run the only solution is to covert them into first world countries.
This is one of the most ignorant and arrogant views I have heard in a long long time. And you even get modded insightful. Wow.
Yes, third world faces horrendous problems. War, dictatorships, racism, food crisis, diseases.
So yes, it is a dying world. And by your proposed logic something like homicide shouldn't even be considered a crime there, because "They die anyway".
All the foreign aide going into third world is useless, because "They die anyway". Safe the money which is invested into the education in these countries because "They die anyway".
I do not hope that the next time you visit a doctor this pendulum swings back to you. Might be interesting to see if you'd agree to some totally arrogant bitch of a stranger telling the doctor to stop helping you because "Listen doctor, in another couple of decades he will die anyway".
The reason for saving the lifes of people is to give them a chance to create a better world. But interesting enough with people like you, living in such a better world (No, I do not know your particular world, but from the point of view of some of the poorest people in this world your life looks like heaven, no matter how hard you think it is), there is a reason why this world is turning for the worse every day a little bit.
Yt,
Gunnar
$45,000 per unit
It was on an episode of Red Green. Pretty good one, too.
I take it you don't have kids, do you?
Call me cold-hearted, but there is a reason that those babies are not surviving.
Yes. They don't have access to proper medical care. Cold-hearted asshole.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Looking at our species the same law naturally applies...
The numbers work out the same, but I don't think it's due to that law. In nature, choosing an R-type (many and cheap) or K-type (few and expensive) reproductive strategy is something the occurs at a genetic level, and has to happen because resources are limited.
But since that balance is in the genes, you can 'break' that law by putting the creature in an unnatural situation. Bacteria in culture or rabbits in Australia can have low mortality and rapid reproduction, because they aren't being held back by predators or a lack of resources. Human beings are in a similar situation in the first world - we could easily have an average of eight children per female like in the third world and still have very low mortality - but we don't, so some other factor must be involved.
Well, in poor countries they keep things running longer, so there aren't a huge supply.
One way of thinking about this might be that there are different financial scales of purchasing in rich countries and poor countries. This leads to different qualitative phenomena, e.g., the attitude towards labor and the prevalence of things like personal servants.
In a rich country, a proper neonatal incubator probably costs a considerable amount of money, but not so much that a hospital with a maternity ward would hesitate to buy enough of them to handle the maximum likely demand in their neonatal ward.
In a poor country, a proper neonatal incubator might be more like getting a CAT scan machine -- every hospital probably could use one, but not every hospital can afford one. However, although a used car (or pile of parts) is a considerable expense, it is one that is affordable on their scale of finances. The labor to transform the car into an incubator is negligible.
All countries have rich people. In fact all countries have something of a middle class. So all countries are going to have cars and a considerable infrastructure to supply those cars with parts. So it's quite practical to look at ways transform cars into other things. We did it in this country when cars were new and expensive relative to the median wage: people tranformed model T's into all kinds of machines.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The reason why conventional medical kit is so expensive is because of the mid-boggling level of safety that must be designed in and tested in every posible combination of fault scenarios.
How does this contraption fare in that respect? Reliability of car headlights, fans relays etc? Abysmal compared wuith ordinary industrial standards, let alone safety-critical medical kit.
I'd heard teaching birth control in countries with strong Christian cultures like the USA is tough is as well...
You can't just take them in the UK either.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Honestly, i dont really give a damn about the incubators...
Nice one. You're obviously not a parent...
When you're a rabbit in Australia, you have three choices. Eat, Sleep, Reproduce.
When you're a woman in a first world country, you have a few more choices. Some of these choices (career?) beat out the whole "vagina=clown car" system.
Thank you for the first reasonable post in this thread! (I know there are others to follow.) People who don't know any better can talk about birth rates all they want, but it's the infant mortality rate that tells the tale. Combine that with the number of otherwise healthy adults dying from diseases like HIV/AIDS and you have places in Africa where the few children remaining are being raised by their few remaining grandmothers because there aren't any parents left to do the job--or to put in the crops or otherwise bring in money and food.
For the past eight years, very capable American agencies have had their hands tied because they can't mention (for example) the fact that you can prevent the spread of HIV by the use of condoms or that you can space the births of your children by means of condoms or other birth control. I'm optimistic that all this is about to change with the new administration, but a lot of ground has been lost in eight years.
The other issue that hasn't been mentioned is that birth rates may be higher in rural, agrarian, or subsistence-level economies because it takes more people per family to make a living. Children, and large families of them, have been an asset across thousands of years. It's only in the past couple of hundred that this has changed.
Also, idly, I'd entertain thoughts of taking the "let the babies die" folks on a stroll through a neonatal intensive care unit and allowing them to choose which of the babies got to live and which had to die. That's because I also believe at some level that humans who haven't been conditioned or brutalized have a natural instinct to try to save any distressed human young that we happen to run across.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
More people, especially children, living in poverty stricken countries. And, more reasons for those fake charities to beg for money.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Nice one. You're obviously not a parent...
Nice one. You're obviously not telepathic...
This is pretty cool - I remember when Kris Olson started talking about this project (he was one of my attendings at MGH). In any event, it's good to see that they have reached their goal. Having spent time in Africa where there's no shortage of newly donated equipment but a dearth of people to fix broken equipment, this should be a huge deal.
Sounds to me like the challenge for a really fucked up episode of Junkyard Wars
"The irony when tending a flock of sheep is the dogs you put in place to protect them are genetically mutated wolves"
Shit, I know its too much of stretch to expect RTFA from many /.ers but I sort of thought that posters and their moderators would read at least the first half of the fucking summary before engaging in a public display of their stupidity.
From the summary:
an incubator found in any neonatal intensive care unit in the US could cost around $40,000, but the incubator they have developed can be built for less than $1,000.
Okay assholes, what this means is even though an incubator built of brand new off the shelf car parts would cost a whopping $1,000, that is only 1/40th the cost of acquiring current technology.
Pretty absurd, eh? Does that suggest that just maybe the "health care industry" is riddled with companies that are in it for the greed? Does it seem that the world might be a better place if idjits with organic neural nets sophisticated enough to participate on slashdot would pay some attention to the cesspools in the "health care industry"?
Our son was born premature. He had to be put in one of these incubators made of car parts for three months.
We added headers, a bigger cam, and switched to an Edelbrock fuel injection system for the incubator. Now he is an all star player in the NFL, NHL, MLB and NBA!
I bet they spend a heck of alot less to build their units. How much can a heat lamp and thermostat cost.
liability insurance is the big expense in mfg any medical equipment. That's the major reason for the $40k unit
And the feeder tube comes in two options: 5W-40 for the healthy newborns and of course 10W-30 synthetic with the special anti-wear technology for the premies.
It isn't Malthusian. The Western ethics are brought/pushed in well ahead of the economic infrastructure that makes them viable. It isn't a 'people will probably starve if infant survival rates increase', it is a 'hey look, infant survival rates increased ahead of the starvation and unrest in <region>'. I guess the point is not that the population pressure cannot be dealt with, but that the population pressure is not being dealt with.
It still makes a mountain of sense to have a policy of trying to make peoples lives more secure (and then easier), but things need to be done in context, not done because they are obviously right in isolation.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Pretty absurd, eh?
Only for people who are bad at math. They're quoting $1000, which is probably just the cost for the parts, and compare it to the catalog price of a brand-spankin'-new incubator which comes with such niceties as being already assembled, being safety- and biocompatibility tested (and you can sue the heck out of whoever made the thing if anything goes wrong), etc.
The creators of the car-parts incubator say that an incubator found in any neonatal intensive care unit in the US could cost around $40,000
Something tells me that as long as you aren't restricting the cars utilized for this to brand new Mercedes-Benz or Hummers, the cost isn't going to be as high as the current ICU equipment.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
A forty-fold increase in the price of a tangible item to cover feel-good intangibles is something you consider reasonable for a health care appliance?
With logic like that, is it any wonder that the health care industry is such an incredible cesspool of greed and corruption?
let's see what makes medical equipment expensive -using defined processes for everything. -using quality control everywhere -getting the approvals/certifications/etc. Cut all this and your incubator is nothing else than an temperatur and humidity controlled box supplied by clean (=filtered) air. You can get that for less than 1000 dollar if you manufacture it in China (and it will still be an order of magnitude more safe than any solution involving used part or parts not designed for the purpose).
Just what the world needs...more babies born to people living on $1 a day, and growing up to be cannon fodder for terrorist religious fanatics.
Now before you call me a fascist and a racist and a sexist and a whatever-the-fuck-ist, please do consider that the population growth curve is approaching vertical. And we are beginning to enter the phase of history that Malthus predicted (after a long delay for technological development) where there would be exponential population growth and linear growth of the resources needed to sustain all these people.
In other words, we don't need all the people that would be 'saved' by building incubators from junk automobile parts. It's cruel, yes, I know. But that's why Allah put white people on the earth, to make the cruel decisions necessary for the survival of the species, so you don't have to.
"vagina=clown car"
Seriously, I know we're talking about an AC here, but this NEEDS to be modded funny...
My sig can beat up your sig.
A forty-fold increase in the price of a tangible item to cover feel-good intangibles is something you consider reasonable for a health care appliance?
Being already assembled is a very tangible benefit, and the whole biocompatibility stuff is also very tangible (or rather - you'll realize the difference after having been in contact with the surfaces of the thing). Same goes for all the other questions. Can it be sterilized properly?
And no, a factor of 40 between a bunch of low-quality, untested parts that maybe can be assembled into something and a tested, finished product that works out of the box is not unreasonable.
Your own newborn baby needs an incubator. There are two sitting there, one but together with old car parts and another brand spanking new unit. Just for the hell of it they offer you $5k if you use the old car parts one. Which do you choose to save your baby?
Now I don't disagree with you. The medical industry is insane with its costs. I just got the bill for a minor surgery and its insane when you look at the line items. $100 for a friggin scalpal. But relying on do it yourself medical equipment might not be the best idea either in a life or death situation.
Parent is right but its a little to late to discuss that when the child is already there. And not to mention the cost of health service and insurance "quirks" may make it unaffordable to some anyway.
Why not get the best of all worlds? It is possible to strive for better, cheaper prenatal care and better, cheaper incubators.
And no, a factor of 40 between a bunch of low-quality, untested parts that maybe can be assembled into something and a tested, finished product that works out of the box is not unreasonable.
No, a factor of 4%, or possibly even as much as 40%, would be a reasonable way of distributing the one time costs of development over the units produced for sale. The factor of 4,000% is not reasonable.
You, sir, are confusing reason with the common rationales used to justify the absurd profits of the health care industry. Don't do that.
Not that it should matter since the argument stands on its own merits, but I speak from 10 years of experience working as an Intensive Care Unit Registered Nurse and an additional 10 years working in hospital administration roles.
The government is only good at making repetitive processes function. Unfortunately, they gild the lily of these repetitive processes over time, increasing the cost and time required.
Some things that have been tried are creating a new agency and abolishing the old one, to streamline the process. This has a limited effect as those hired by the new agency are often the same faces as at the old. The only way to reduce cost and streamline the process would be to privatize it, but the inevitable corruption in this approach would show forth the futility of the entire process.
Mind you, none of this increases safety. This mostly increases perceived safety, and is analogous to the security theater in US airports in this regard. But people are always asking government for things government cannot do, such as assuring safety.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
The initial increase can (and should) be reduced by providing contraceptives, legalizing abortion, teaching sexual education in schools, and minimizing the influence of religion (if it goes against the first 3). These are things that all modern societies have done, I don't see any reason why others would be unable to do so.
Trying to explicitly do that won't work well. Religion tends to violently oppose direct attempts to "reduce it's influence". Those things tend happen anyway in societies that increase their affluence. In affluent career-oriented societies children are a burden. They have to be housed and educated to quite high levels. They also pretty much need to be maintained well above sustenance levels to gain entry to work/social ladders. So it isn't common to have more than two or three or even one kid in such societies. Most people also survive to old age in these societies and many AREN'T supported and maintained by their children in old age.
Societies with high birth and deathrates need many children for their version of social support. Many won't survive to even young adulthood so the birthrate goes high to offset that. In addition, those few who survive into old age are respected elders and can expect that the younger generations will provide for them. Cut the birthrate without addressing the economic side and the societal balance is gone.
If one wants to help a society in such straits, then find a way to raise the industrial/tech level. All else is band-aids.
If there is a proper incubator to use sure. But if the choice is between a car-part one and nothing and the child will almost certainly die with nothing then the car-part incubator starts looking pretty good.
There are millions of cars just sitting around all over the world, and stuff like air-conditioning has been around since the 1950's or so, headlights for even longer, etc.
Exactly! My baby was concieved in the back of a 57 cadillac, it's only appropriate that he's incubated in one too.
That's assuming that new parts are not available.
I would imagine that, even if you purchased new and shipped from an auto parts store, these would be worlds cheaper than a normal incubator.
Nobody said the parts had to come from used cars...
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Sometimes the trade-off between "crude and mostly works", "works every time perfectly" and "don't have the damn thing at all" has to be made.
Where resources are scant, you do the best effort to get something, even if it's somewhat sub-optimal. At least then there's a chance of helping someone who is almost certain to die.
If the choice is no care and death, or crappy care and a chance, most people will take crappy care.
"That's because I also believe at some level that humans who haven't been conditioned or brutalized have a natural instinct to try to save any distressed human young that we happen to run across."
That an instinct exists does not make it useful. When we eliminate natural selection and try to protect maladapted cultures from the effects of their defects we perpetuate problems. There is no reason to try to preserve the backward peoples who cannot preserve themselves. It does not benefit us.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Sorry but this particular application fails the sniff test. Let me start by saying that I really wanted to be encouraging about this. The use of recycled auto parts to save infant lives is a truely noble gesture. Unfortunately the way the lives are saved may just be by ruining them. There may be a way to sterilyze the parts used without causing rust, oxidation, or corrosion but keeping them sterile would be a monumental if not impossible task. The second and more serious problem is that the method of warming the infants-pointing a car headlight at them is like stabbing them in the eyes. Neonates have undeveloped eyes that cannot regulate the amount of light that hit their retinas. They would be better off in complete darkness than a bright light on them. Their ears have a similar problem. They need silence to be able to develop smoothly and the open nature of the "junkyard" incubator does nothing to help this issue.
your car wasn't worth much anyway it might not be worth it.
There was an article in a paper a while back where the police mentioned they'd confiscated like seven cars from this one dude - he had basically a lifetime revokation for DUIs, and they'd take his car whenever they caught him(usuaully drunk). He'd just go out and buy another cheap sub-$500 car - cheaper than impound fees and such. Part of the article was, of course, outrage over why the guy wasn't in prison.
Personally, call me old fashioned but I think that car confiscations, even/especially for drug stuff should be handled through the courts. Confiscations, period, for that matter.
I don't read AC A human right
You can argue over all the variables of crop yields, oil reserves, etc, and it only changes when, not if, mass global food shortages will come.
I don't see what the problem is. Overpopulation is a self correcting system.
Either technology will be improved to allow for the new population numbers or a war will ensue thereby creating more technology in the process (ie WWII)
To say technology can't solve the problem is a bit small minded. It has been solving the problem for over 500 years in advancements in agricultural and industrial production. In fact, even with population increase, last decade there were more than 100 million less people in extreme poverty.
Now it is not sustainable with current technology, but technology constantly improves because there is a demand for it.
To say the world going to fall apart into anarchy is just dumb. If it would have, it would have done so in the 1930's or 1970's when the global situation is quite worse..
Doesn't mean people should stop breeding, but that its not doom and gloom as people put it.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
True, but when higher technology is actually available, the birth rate drops. This has held true for about 1/3 of the earths population across several cultures.
I'd argue that it's more due to quality of life improvements and education, but technology largely allows them, so it's a bit of a moot point.
I don't read AC A human right
Apologies for my previous knee-jerk response - it's just that your comment touched a nerve, being a parent who experienced the gut-wrenching anguish of seeing a child in an incubator.
Perhaps your comment wasn't meant to be flippant WRT life-saving (possible) innovations.
I thought the point of using car parts is that they are cheap, easily available, and run on 12 volts
The thousand dollars quote leads me to believe that you're right - it wouldn't be even a grand if you're taking parts out of a junk yard, but who wants to do that? I figure that these incubators are using new parts, just ones from the automotive industry and not the medical industry for economy of scale and robustness. Though, yes, the ability to use junkyard parts for repairs is mentioned.
For example, most headlights are under $20, so that's only $40 for your heat source. 12V cabling is relatively cheap, there's various thermostats you can get. They're vibration resistant, and a AC-DC transformer will provide a good amount of protection from surges, especially if you put a car battery in the circuit to provide backup. Automotive fuses can provide safety and prevent damage. For that matter, car equipment is designed to take anything from like 12V to 14.4-15V, so it's robust from that angle as well.
The article mentions detractors that say that intervention, skilled delivery people, emergency care would be better. I'd argue that those would cost more - importing a western trained doctor is expensive. Low-hanging fruit, people. One step at a time. Incremental improvement.
Heck, if it's good enough, I'd like to see them in our hospitals. Perhaps a fancier, more expensive model, but still cheap compared to current ones. Look at our healthcare costs. How much money would be saved if we could get, instead of a $40k incubator, a $5k incubator instead? Figure a thousand incubators a state per year(50k total), that'd be $1.75 BILLON saved. Not including any maintenance savings, given that current incubators are maintenance hogs per the article, and I didn't see any mention of parts that you'd expect to replace any given year with the auto one. Sure, not much against the trillions we spend now - but as they say, a billion here and there, and suddenly you're looking at real money. ;)
I don't read AC A human right
Like the computer made from tinker-toys that plays tic-tac-toe? http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~cfs/472_html/Intro/TinkertoyComputer/TinkerToy.html
would do well to use the wikileaks or thepiratebay as examples of avoiding concerted legal attacks from multiple jurisdictions
What if they phrased it a bit differently?
Sir, you have the choice between this $40k rube goldberg incubator that fails, on average, every other week or whenever the power goes a bit wonky, and our nurses can't operate correctly because we can't find the manual, or this one built out of commodity parts with a MTBF of 40k hours that can be serviced by the guy who also works on our ambulances? By the way, it only cost us $5k*, so we'll give you a cut on your bill if you pick that one.
*I figure we'd still get a fancy one, so I upped the price a bit.
I don't read AC A human right
The US medical industry is all about litigation
There, fixed it for you.
You make all very good points, but just wanted to point out that your comments apply primarily to the US (don't have any idea how they would apply in Europe). In many places in Africa, just send your old car parts to them and I'm sure they'll trade a near definite chance of dying for a somewhat lower chance of dying.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I'm suggesting that they are a high risk group that could be encouraged to delay having children until a time when there is less apparent risk.
Given the research I've seen, we already delay childbirth more than necessary, proper pre-natal care is more important today than delaying pregnancy. From what I've read, 16-18 for the age of the mother is also the category with the least number of problems, given proper care.
I don't read AC A human right
hey we have broke auto makers looking for a new revenue stream don't we?
Why bother
Of course mass starvation is still very fresh in the minds of the Chines, never mind the fact that they were caused, like the starvation in many parts of Africa, by failed government policies.
There is plenty of growing capacity on earth, the only reason that supply will not meet demand is because of market manipulations by the governments like what is happening in Zimbabwe. The Oil bogyman doesn't really work, worst case scenario they will go to coal gasification and let the developed nations cry about global warming.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/alex_singleton/blog/2008/04/13/big_government_causes_starvation
OK - so there are too few incubators available in developing nations. I bet doctors there know that
OK - so you can build an incubator out of a wide range of materials. I bet local people in developing nations are smart enough to figure that out, maybe even have a few improvements of their own to offer.
Having a government that would allow anything like this to actually come to pass. Now there's a problem...
As a devil's advocate stance, how about we abandon all aid of any description and focus simply on educating people with the hope of getting them to elect competent, open governments within the next 30 years and helping them to take control of their own fertility, give them options for living into old age that don't rely on having 20 children.
What can we do to help make that happen ?
Nullius in verba
Right, in the long run the only solution is to covert them into first world countries.
Just a matter of getting them hooked on internet porn, then that girl next door just doesn't look as desirable anymore.
Maybe the OLPC project may help the population problem, provided it's kept well into teen years and has a good .jpg viewer and plenty of drive space?
No wonder our company bellied up: we built cars out of incubator parts.
Table-ized A.I.
Back in the '80s the company I was working for investigated making a similar product, a neonatal phototherapy unit. While the product could have been made more cheaply than the competition, the necessary regulatory approvals, safety tests, and other red tape would have pushed the price up far enough that the savings in materials wouldn't have mattered... and the competing product had already passed all of that and was on the market.
No McGyver tag for this one?
...1.8 million infants might be spared every year if they could spend just a week in the units....
1.8 million more humans to act as force multipliers for continued global warming. If you are serious about reducing human contribution to global warming then stop creating humans. Seventy years or so and the human contribution to global warming will be about zero.
Harsh? Maybe. But it's the reality nobody seems to want to talk about.
> I dont see what that has to do with it, do a search for "american junkyard" or "african scrapyard", etc, etc.
This seems like it'll get some play in 3rd world countries, but I don't see it happen in the US. Anyone who tries it will get sued or legislated out of existence. For instance, there will be the inevitable dimwits who worry about carbon monoxide poisoning.
This will only work in areas that have access to sufficient car parts, and have a sufficiently low enough ratio of lawyers/humans to be allowed to use it.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.