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Cheap Incubator Backpack Could Reduce Infant Deaths
Boy Wunda writes "In just one six-month period in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2006, 96 newborn babies who were in need of medical care died before they could get help. In many developing nations, these deaths could be prevented simply by providing better ways for medical responders to transport infants properly over rough terrain and keep them alive until they can reach hospitals and clinics. Now, a group of Colorado State University seniors has designed and filed a patent for a medically equipped incubator backpack unit that they believe can reduce baby deaths in medical emergencies both in the United States and in newly industrialized nations."
I propose your mother attend one of these clinics and have you aborted.
I was hoping this would be just the ticket for helping me with my cross-border baby-smuggling operation. But the thing's transparent, kinda defeating the whole purpose of "smuggling", and it's huge but can only carry one baby!
I'm sticking with my REI-brand frame backpack for baby smuggling. Swing and a miss, CSU. Swing and a miss.
The enemies of Democracy are
Even the article say so: "We have to say that being carried skin to skin by a warm human body in a baby-carrier (aka 'kangaroo care') actually sounds a lot more humane, safe and baby-friendly for a newborn than being carried strapped to a board in a giant plastic box...But, we have to ask: wouldn't a low-tech solution of using a cloth baby-carrier on a compassionate person often be better, safer, cheaper and easier than this ginormous contraption? It's been scientifically shown that the best way to regulate the breathing and heartbeat of a newborn infant is to have that infant snuggle up, chest-to-chest, skin-to-skin with his mom or dad right after birth."
Also, it's 2010. We don't call them 'third world countries' anymore. We call them 'developing nations'. The former is so Cold War...
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
While this seems like a great idea for helping babies (I'm not a doctor), why can't they just publish the idea so everyone can benefit instead of just the cities / villages / towns / areas / families / whatever that can afford to buy one? The patent part is all about making money. At the expense of dying children. No different than drug companies (and many others) in my eyes. Although I do have to say that when I was their (apparent) age, I wanted to be filthy rich and didn't see anything wrong with that. Now that I'm (supposedly) more mature (and much older), I see things like this and wonder why can't people just do some things for the good of mankind? No I'm not naive, I just don't understand human nature sometimes.
There are no stupid questions, only stupid people asking questions.
I just had a baby, born very premature.. was just released from the hospital after 68 days (52 of those on life support).. Waited a long time for beds to open at up different hospitals and had to wait for the proper transport vehicle to become available.. The coincidental part, I named my son Timothy.
Just have poor people raise less babies. They don't have money to provide for their kids anyway.
my infant was just released from the hospital.. total cost of stay, $101,520 for 68 days... they do it for the good of mankind, so long as mankind has his Health Insuranse Plan card.
And there was me thinking a house of learning and innovation was actually making a positive contribution to the infant mortality rate.
Then I saw the magic words "and filed a patent for", and realised like everything else, it's all about the money. Whatever happened to altruism ?
How do you get a dead baby out of a blender?
This is just a musing I have had for a while. The medicine as a field has seen vast improvements over the years, the survivability of a person and average age have boomed. Is this such a good thing, really? For each of us individually, yes. Hell, if not for the incubators and similar early treatments, I would not even be here. What about the bigger picture? Are we, the humanity in general, slowly messing up our gene pool? Take away the healthcare, white and pink pills, and we are more screwed than the people some 100 years ago. Allergies, heart problems, the works. The fact that medicine helps us get to the age of reproduction is, in my humble opinion, not all that helpful in the bigger picture. Don't scald me too harshly - I admit that without advances in medicine I would not have made to my first birthday.
Maybe because this isn't something you can just slap together. Sometimes you need financial backing and sometimes you need someone with manufacturing expertise. Like it or not, this is how the world works. I'm fairly certain if every little bit of technology we just given away, for the "good" of the people, we wouldn't have half the resources we have available today,
...and bust ghosts.
While this might well help save lives, I don't think it would make that much difference in a place like Rio de Janeiro, where corruption is rife. A previous governor is being investigated for walking off with US $30 million supposedly spent on social programs and his wife, who also governed for a term, swindled another US $38 million that was supposed to have been spent on health. Of course, these numbers are tiny in comparison to the hundreds of millions being cited in oficial investigations into these and other scandals.
Rio is last place on the planet that I would ever recommend anyone spend even $1 on health initatives, unless, through some miracle, the endemic corruption in the governmental structures was somehow fixed.
But how do you get the baby to wear the backpack?
I'm not advocating that 'all' inventions / improvements should be 'given away'. It just seems like some things should be done for the good of mankind. I do believe that patents play a role in helping innovation when someone thinks they can make money from something. But that being said, as pointed out on /. so many times in the past, people / corporations abuse the patent process for monetary gain.
I guess what would be nice is to occasionally hear a story about someone who does invent something, and then they make the information available for anyone and everyone to benefit from. Just because it seemed like the right thing to do.
I'm not looking for Utopia, just a better balance between greed and paying it forward.
There are no stupid questions, only stupid people asking questions.
Because here's a bitter reality: a whole bunch of people worked on this thing for a long time - months, or even years, to make it happen. If you want to appeal to emotion ("at the expense of dying children") - I'll do the same - these people quite likely have children who will be homeless and possibly starve if their parents are putting months or years worth of work only to have it given away "for the good of mankind".
Now if you want to suggest that a government or generous charity should buy it then that's fine, but you can't expect people to starve because the work they have done happens to benefit the needy, because I can tell you the immediate result of that: people won't bother with working on this sort of thing anymore.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Very well said. Here's hoping the GP takes what you've said to heart and learns from it. But, sadly, if he's "much older" and still hopelessly naive, he probably won't.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Your contemporary incubator, as found inhabiting the NICU, is a pricey and sophisticated beast. Now, I'm sure that the "pricey" part could probably be cut substantially if you said "fuck it, 'medical grade' is worthless if you can't afford it. We'll do this one 'commercial grade' and the vast increase in access will more than compensate for a few deaths due to system faults". However, that still leaves you with the "sophisticated" bit. We are talking supplemental oxygen, temp/humidity control, sterile barriers for infection control, a variety of intravenous delivery tubes(nutrition and various medications), sometimes various sorts of respiratory assistance stuff, and vital signs monitoring.
The trouble is, a lot of those functions aren't simply mechanical, or operable without sophisticated maintenance and expert control. Intravenous anything is infection central without serious attention to sterile technique(and, ideally, lots of 1-time-use components). Supplemental oxygen is fine, if your impoverished hellhole happens to have a source of clean, pure, gasses around. Barring the development of extremely sophisticated diagnostics expert systems, the ability to administer drugs(even if you have the drugs) is largely useless without a doctor to tell you which ones to use. Even basic climate control will, in any humid and unpleasantly tropical environment, probably spend its time spewing spores into kiddo's lungs unless somebody who knows their shit maintains it.
I have to wonder if within, say a year or two of deployment, such a system wouldn't be actively worse(as well as more expensive and less available) than having mom, to whose germs kiddo has already been exposed, scoop kiddo up and start walking. Babies are small, an adult should be able to keep their temperature roughly stable through contact, as well as administering oral nutrition and hydration. Pretty much anything that a parent can't do, neither can technology, without a formidable infrastructure behind it.
It is, undeniably, the case that modern medicine can deliver results far superior to its predecessors for a wide variety of conditions. However, it is hard to just slice off a neat little bit of modern medicine and expect it to work in the field without further input from a vast and interlocking set of systems. And, to the degree that you can do that, one of the parts of the system you slice off is usually a doctor(and most people didn't just slog through Med school to man the village clinic of upper nowhereistan). Medicines are complex chemicals. Most of them lose efficacy unpleasantly quickly outside of environmentally controlled conditions(and good luck if any cutting/recompounding/repackaging/adulteration occurs along the way). Pretty much anything that should be sterile won't be if it has ever left its package, unless it has since been subjected to(often nontrivial) disinfection procedures. Even drugs that still have some punch to them can kill you good and hard if administered incorrectly. Filters go from cleaning fluids to harboring fungi and crap fairly quickly.
they do it for the good of mankind, so long as mankind has his Health Insuranse Plan card
Why are health care practitioners derided when they want to make a decent living just like the rest of us? The harsh reality is, the only reason your child got such excellent care was because you PAID for it (ok, the insurance paid, and you pay the premiums, but that's splitting hairs). Without the motivation to earn good money, the medical field would not attract the best and brightest minds, nor would we have the fantastic advances in medical advances that we enjoy now. Sure, there are altruistic folks out there who do wonderful work, but there's no way we could care for everyone without the support of a well-financed medical industry like we have now.
Besides, by law, no one is supposed to be denied emergency medical care in the US. Hospitals simply absorb the cost (well, in reality, they pass the cost onto paying customers) of uninsured patients who can't afford treatment. Incidentally, it's reported now that 55% of emergency care is uncompensated.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Why do we need more people on this planet again?
I mean, baby deaths in third world are more part of a solution than a problem. They're actually a good thing. The worst that can happen is that the infant still is damaged by, god knows, lack of oxygen or infection, and would be permanently injured or decapacitated. Then what, one more unproductive person in third world, one more mouth to feed? Completely healthy little fellows starve to death every day, and they survived the first test. Think about how much time and effort, energy and money, is invested in a growing child. Isn't it better that it dies right off the bat, and now after, say, 4 years when his/her parents neglect him/her or fail to provide enough food?
Because you charge crazy high rates?
Any reason why a doctor makes so much more than a phd?
We honestly need to commoditize health care and offer medical school free to qualifying students. Let surplus labor drive down costs.
...we should be offering free tubal ligations to any woman who wants one. Dicks that impregnate are a dime a dozen, by eliminating births we would be doing the global populous a favor. One non-child bearing woman provides many savings throughout the future that far surpasses the cost of a TL.
While this seems like a great idea for helping babies (I'm not a doctor), why can't they just publish the idea so everyone can benefit instead of just the cities / villages / towns / areas / families / whatever that can afford to buy one? The patent part is all about making money. At the expense of dying children.
Did you RTFA?
They're not building a centrifuge out of salad spinners.
Here's an incomplete list of features they've included:
"an electric heating system, air circulation, an air controller, various alarms that monitor the baby's temperature, etc."
Now look at this picture and tell me that it seems like something you can jury rig in a developing country.
P.S. An appeal to emotion isn't actually an argument.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
So that's the way for people who can afford it.
Jane Chen presents us a way to save more than rich people's babies:
n the developing world, access to incubators is limited by cost and distance, and millions of premature babies die each year. TED Fellow Jane Chen shows an invention that could keep millions of these infants warm -- a design that's safe, portable, low-cost and life-saving.
http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_chen_a_warm_embrace_that_saves_lives.html
-Arc
People are willing to pay more dollars more often to have the health or life of a loved one saved than they are to listen to some boring self important blowhard dipshit.
_I_ don't need to do anything. There are already lots of ways _you_ can provide scholarships for qualified students to become doctors. Why aren't you?
There are several things that make health care very expensive in this country:
1) nobody knows what it costs, so they never comparison shop on price; they rarely refuse service because of costs. Thus, there is no incentive to control costs. There is no market, so to speak.
2) not everybody pays, but everybody receives. That uncompensated care is paid for _somehow_
3) Doctors have their labor union legally protected by law everywhere in the US. Want to be a doctor? All the other doctors in the US get to decide that they're willing to tolerate some competition before you're allowed to practice medicine here.
Breaking the union stranglehold on who can practice medicine, and not requiring care providers to render care regardless of ability to pay would make medicine very affordable. The first would probably allow some people to receive lower quality care some of the time. It would also allow some people to receive higher quality care some of the time. I bet it's a net positive for both care and affordability [since providers would compete on reputation instead of on union membership].
You would think that the latter -- removing the legal obligation to provide care -- would mean that many people would immediately start going without care, but I don't think this is the case. In the not-so-distant past, people and doctors managed to work out payment plans and there weren't epidemic die-offs due to inability to acquire "insurance".
Essentially, the high cost of care is due to collusion between government and insurers. Remove the government involvement, and things get better.
Of course, that's not the direction people are trying to take things...
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
....why do we need people who can't raise a child conceiving them? And yes, that includes my own 1st world country. Free tubal ligations is the way to go.
So these dreadfully ill newborns born to people too poor to take care of themselves in the prenatal period, or just cursed with bad genes, will survive.
They will survive with increased risks of disease and deformity, bringing an emotional and financial burden upon their already overstretched parents, in a society with few social resources to care for them.
And then their living older siblings will suffer from decreased parental attention, relationships will be put under strain, and only a few of them will achieve normal adult lives.
So unless these premature babies bring in billions of dollars of social support infrastructure as well, I daresay the outcome would be worse than just letting them die and getting on with making the next one.
Yeah, except nether of those take in reporting bias.
For example: In Japan it's not required to report them as infant mortality. Deaths at birth can get labels as fetal mortality. In other countries an infant under a certain weight gets labels as fetal mortality.
In some countries. for example Norway and Sweden, 40% of all their fetal deaths would have been counted as Infant mortality in the US.
I Just finished reading up on a ton of research on this issue. Literally. I sent my email of the compiled data and loaded Slashdot. Weird.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So your argument is poor people are too stupid to learn how to operate a machine?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The classic Zorg v. Vito debate.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
No, my argument is that machines can only be operated over time if they exist within range of the supply structure that their technology requires. Poor people are, of necessity, typically quite good generalists. However, they aren't magically good and the downside of poverty and generalism is the unavailability of specialized hardware.
High tech machines generally, and medical apparatus is particularly bad, tend to rely on a huge web of interlocking suppliers, substantial amounts of human and physical capital, and accumulated expertise. If you have those, keeping things running is generally pretty easy(with the exception of specific jobs requiring substantial human capital). If you don't, all the smarts and ingenuity you can muster won't help you very much.
In this case, my argument is that the survival advantages of an incubator over just being held directly against a parent, while nontrivial, rely almost entirely on some quite specialized supplies and spare parts. If you don't have those, you have a problem. If anything, poor people probably have more experience with lousy supply lines and improvising, so they'd probably keep it working longer; but, ultimately, the only way to keep such a device working is to be connected to its supply chain, or to recreate that supply chain from scratch.
There was an analogous case that I'm thinking of, can't find the link offhand. Some charitable NGO was providing wheelchairs to the impoverished and disabled in, I believe, Kenya. They quickly found that the western donor units they could easily get were nearly useless, mostly designed for light-duty use indoors and on paved surfaces, and made largely of plastics and aluminum. They broke quickly, and once they did, they were hard to repair(the recipients couldn't exactly go back to the manufacturer for replacement plastics, and aluminum welding requires inert shield gasses and is somewhat touchy). However, the areas they were interested in had a considerable store of general mechanical know-how, and plenty of locally available blacksmithing and iron/steel welding ability. So, they switched to a more bicycle-derived design, with more robust parts made of metals that could easily be worked with local equipment and expertise, and the problem went away.
That isn't a story about stupidity. Per capita, the locals were probably less helpless than the donors; but a story about how aluminum frames are superior when you can order shield gasses at any welding supply place, and how they aren't where you can't.
How do you get it there in the first place?
Drop them out of an airplane as a preventive measure, say... 15 of those per square kilometer?
This is utter nonsense.
If you can get a doctor to the mother, you can move the baby as well. No need for backpacking.
Unless the doctor has to get there over the remnants of a suspension bridge. And in that case, he/she is not going back the same way with the incubator on the back anyway.
Oh... wait... this should be used if the doctor suspects, based on the ultrasound, that the baby will be born prematurely?
Well then... how about keeping the mother in the bloody hospital?
Also, FFS take a look at the photos.
That thing looks like it was built by men who have never in their lives held a healthy baby in their hands - let alone a sick one. (And the "inventors", if that's them fit that description perfectly.)
An incubator that would hold a barely breathing baby in upright position, fastened across the chest with straps? Seriously?
Why not just pack the brat in a plastic bag and then jog merrily to the hospital while swinging the bag around?
I mean... if they really want to put additional strain on the barely living kid.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
We are actually pursuing non-profit organizations to take this on. I know we won't make money off of it, I don't care...
This invention provides a great answer to anyone arguing against the existence of the patent law system as a necessary incentive for spurring innovation. This example of the intersection of patents and the public interest shows that intellectual property law is beneficial not only for profit margins, but also for the public interest.