She informed me of a number of difficulties with the Premature Baby Warmer project, although she confirmed some thoughts that preserve a slight hope for the usefulness of the project:
- Warmers are certainly needed.
- A system that could use cell-phone batteries successfully is potentially valuable.
- In most of the developing world, the Ministry of Health provides most of the supplies to clinics. This is a top-down model, and the idea of publishing an open-source solution is at odds with this, being a bottom-up approach.
- It might be true that 10% of the babies that need it could be helped by people who have the kind of internet access that would allow them to use internet instructions to build a warmer.
- Kangaroo Care is effective in approximately the same conditions that we are trying to address, so it may be that only a fraction of births, when the mother if disabled, benefit from this idea anyway.
In other words: if we manage to build an easy to construct $25 warmer than is 100% safe and effective, the number of babies we can hope to save with this approach is just a fraction of those that might need it.
Of course, perhaps more than 100,000 low birth-weight babies die every year. Perhaps 10% of those will be close to someone with a good internet connection and the skills to build the Arduino-based warmer. Perhaps 10% of those will have a mother that, at least temporarily, needs a warmer.
One in a 100 of 100,000 is still 1,000. I'm willing to put more time into a project that might save 1,000 babies a year.
Furthermore, it is possible that the know-how from the creation of this will help someone smarter build something better---or build something completely unrelated which is valuable.
So, without believing that I am very close to producing much good in this world, I think this project is worth some more of our time.
Contact me if you want to volunteer---there is no lack of work to be done, with almost any skill.
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