Report: ATX Hack for Change 2015 Preemie Baby Warmer

This weekend I led a team at the ATX Hack for Change Hackathon improving the Preemie Baby Warmer project of the Austin chapter of Engineers Without Borders.

Each year more than 100,000 babies born prematurely without access to Western medicine die needlessly. There are at least two attempts to address this problem.  The Embrace warmer is an elegant solution available in theory for $25.  However, it is made by a for-profit company, and its design is not open-source, and depends on difficult-to-manufacture phase change material.  I would prefer to empower local people to construct their own using inexpensive and readily available material.

Rice University's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen has created a different solution: a $250 box-style isolette.  However, this is clearly an "in clinic" solution.

Engineering seeks practical solutions.  There is usually a design spectrum, and it is better to have a richly populated design spectrum.  We are producing a different point in the design space than either of these solutions.

I had previously constructed a prototype that I exhibited at the Austin Mini Maker Faire.  My friend Chip Rosenthal came by our table and invited me to the ATX Hack for Change Hackathon, specifically because I was working on a hardware project, something that would diversify the ATX hackathon. As one experienced hacker said, "I've never seen a sewing machine at a Hackathon before."

I was very lucky to get two brilliant young people on my team, and the help of an small team of IBM engineers as well. This is Josh Benson, who is a very clearly thinking and helped me with the electronics and programming, as well as just thinking about what to do.

 This is Cameron Lagrone, who was our MVP. She designed and constructed the "swaddle" completely from scratch in a single Saturday, and frankly it is more elegant and beautiful than anything I could have done.  She combined the sewing chops with the ability to think of innovative simplifications.

 Here is a picture of the "swaddle" that she produced, with our "Test Preemie" inside it.

It is not obvious from the photo, but inside the swaddle is a pocket holding the electric heating cloth controlled by the Arduino.  The tremendous beauty of this design is:

• It can be made from two t-shirts and a shoestring an an hour or two of sewing.  That means it can be made so easily you DON'T have to make it before a child is born prematurely---which is of course unpredictable.  If you have the open-source instructions and pattern, you can make it before the mother needs to sleep from the delivery! And everyone has some cotton cloth and some string.
• It needs no fasteners.  You just "swaddle" the baby almost as you would with a blanket. It imposes minimal cultural strangeness, as most of the world swaddles newborns with cloth in this way.
• It is a separate module from the electronics.  You can use it just as a "blanky" without the electronics.
• The "hoodie", when a fairly stiff material such as felt is used as the middle layer, protects the infants airway, while still insulating the head, probably better than a simple blanket could do.

The swaddle allows us to perform experiments we could not meaningful perform before.

The first observation that we could make is that, as I had previously conjectured, the Test Preemie that I created is a poor test object at present because it does not conduct heat significantly.

We fixed this with a quick trip to the pharmacy to get an gel-based hot/cold compress that weighs about two pounds (about the size of an underweight baby.)

A basic premise of this approach is that a large percentage of people have enough electrical power to charge cell phones, but don't have grid power.  However, the Warmer will only be practical if it can maintain body temperature for the infant with available battery power. This will require more research than we could do in the hackathon, but we could now move forward.

Oliver D. Rodriguez and the IBM team came to our aid here. They did something I have never done---they wrote an outside reader (in Python) which read from the output from the serial port written by the Arduino.  This allowed us to make a running data log of the temperature. (That's Oliver on the left most, with Kay Freund seated, who also helped.)

Using two 6 Volt lantern batteries, we were able to raise the gel pack from room temperature (25C) to skin temperature (35C) in 37 minutes inside the swaddle.  This was a successful test, although the actual use case is much easier---an infant should never have a room temperature body!  So I deemed this an encouraging result.

If you have ever been to a hackathon, you know how exhausting they can be.  I went home at 10:00 hoping to perform a far better "maintain the body heat" test---and collapsed.

In the morning, we finished our presentation, and mostly socialized, until the presentation.

We made what I consider a lot of progress:

• We have a replicable set of instructions for making a practical, cheap swaddle.
• We tested our ability to heat with encouraging (though incomplete) results.
• We also added a sonic alarm for when the baby is too cold or too hot---which is a big improvement in safety and robustness.

I am pleased that the Austin hackathon is not competitive as some are.  Nonetheless, the judges gave out a few superlatives.  We won "Most Hacked Forward".

People seemed to generally really admire our project.  It felt great.

I now feel two things very strongly:

1. It is my duty to document this as well as possible.  If others cannot use it, all of the energy and love is meaningless.  It is fine with me if people use it as an example to improve upon, rather than a tool for saving lives.
2. In fact this approach is very far from changing the world, an a lot of work remains to be done.  I would estimate about 10 times the total work that has been done so far.