It is said that coffee, Coke and cigarettes can be found anywhere in the world. The presence of another C — car parts — recently led a team of industrial designers, doctors and rural heath care experts to conceive a device that could significantly lower infant mortality rates in developing nations.
The NeoNurture car-parts incubator is presently featured at the Cooper-Hewitt museum’s National Design Triennial, here in New York, and leads off Time magazine’s coverage of the year’s most notable inventions. Though its production plans remain in flux, the device might eventually prompt medical equipment manufacturers and aid agencies to re-evaluate their approaches to neonatal care in rural, impoverished areas.
NeoNurture repurposes discarded car parts to govern incubator systems like heat and airflow — the very systems that might break on more sophisticated units provided by nongovernmental organizations, especially because of voltage surges from ad hoc electricity sources.
“Every rural clinic in the developing world has a shack full of broken donated medical equipment,” said Timothy Prestero, chief executive of the Cambridge, Mass., design consultancy Design That Matters, which has helped steer the incubator through various prototype stages.
The project traces its roots to a heaping pile of dead Toyota 4Runners. “In the summer of 2007, a few guys just tore one apart,” Mr. Prestero said. “They discarded thousands of pieces until they had things that are plentiful in rural areas: headlight assemblies to provide heat, air-intake filters and such, which could be repurposed without much fuss.”
The greatest design challenge for the group has been resisting standardization. “As soon as you say, ‘You can only use a 4Runner’s headlight,’ the value goes out the window,” Mr. Prestero said. This problem might ultimately determine what aspects of NeoNurture’s approach will translate to mass production.
“Dashboard fans for circulation, signal lights and door chimes for alarms, the battery — those pieces aren’t so difficult to source locally,” Mr. Prestero continued. “A headlight filament might use a different gas, though, and that’s when it gets complicated.”
Design That Matters and its partners are working with the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology in Boston to further universalize the incubator’s hardware.
Whatever form a production version takes, NeoNurture has already posed a compelling — and empowering — argument. “I don’t know where you get a replacement incubator filter in a remote Nepalese village,” Mr. Prestero said, “but you likely can find someone there who can replace a car’s air filter. That’s where this idea really has virtue.”
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