Mission Embrace prevents death and illness among newborn babies in developing countries using a low-cost incubator that works with no electricity. The Problem 20 million premature and low-birth-weight (LBW) babies are born every year – 80% of them in rural areas of developing countries. Due to a lack of resources, 3.5 million of them die, and those that do survive grow up with severe health problems. Many of these can be prevented with an incubator, a device that regulates a baby’s body temperature. However, traditional incubators cost thousands of dollars, and are available only in urban hospitals. Even when available, they are largely in disrepair. Most parents living in rural areas cannot afford to get their child to one of these hospitals. Our Solution Embrace’s solution is a $25 incubator, designed to work in a primary healthcare center or at home. It uses no electricity, has no moving parts, and is portable, very safe, and intuitive to use. It uses an innovative phase- change material (PCM) in a sleeping bag design to regulate a baby’s temperature at 37oC, critical for the infant’s survival. The PCM is heated simply through pouring hot water into a pouch. The device works for over 4 hours at a stretch without intervention. The product is designed to facilitate and complement the current WHO-advocated practice of kangaroo care, and will easily integrate into current maternal training programs. We have commitments from NGOs for field trials, and plan to launch in India. We will prove efficacy through NGO partners, and will distribute globally through government healthcare centers and NGOs. The Impact This product bridges the gap in quality of healthcare available to a rural-born baby and that available to an urban- born one. It will improve the lifelong health of LBW babies who will otherwise die or grow up sickly. We plan to put an end to current unsafe practices like placing babies under light bulbs, and tying hot-water bottles to their bodies – practices borne of desperation. Over the next five years, we project 135,000 babies saved in India, and another 3.8 million with improved health outcomes. One of the U.N. millennium development goals is the reduction of infant mortality by two-thirds by 2015. The Embrace incubator is an innovative technology that will help families save their children, and governments achieve this goal. The Team Jane Chen, Rahul Panicker, Razmig Hovaghimian, Linus Liang, Naganand Murty, and Fabio Tran are graduate students of business, engineering, and public policy at Stanford, Harvard, and Northwestern Universities. We have a team of advisors that includes product designers at Stanford and IDEO, doctors at Stanford and the National Neonatology Forum of India, professors of business, medicine, engineering, and public policy at Stanford and Harvard, and leaders of global healthcare NGOs. Financials Embrace is a sustainable non-profit. Our customers are healthcare NGOs and governments, who also form the best distribution channels for our product. We expect to break even by year 3, and require USD 300,000 for the first two years of operation. These will go towards product development, clinical and field trials, and personnel. Over time, Embrace will use its IP to diversify to other medical products for BoP markets. Embrace: An Infant Incubator for the Developing World www.embraceglobal.org Rahul Panicker, rahulap@stanfordalumni.org