Saving premature newborns with 200-dollar incubators

“If I can do this, anyone can do it. You should dream big and be confident in yourself,” Jane Chen (38), co-founder and CEO of Embrace Innovation, said in an exclusive interview with The Dong-A Ilbo at the SK Happiness Foundation in Seoul. “Everything is a matter of will.” She visited Korea to give a lecture at a conference marking the 10th anniversary of the foundation on Wednesday. Embrace Innovation is a company that produces and delivers sleeping bag-shaped heating devices to help save premature newborns in developing countries where incubators are not available for use.

Chen decided to develop a low-cost incubator in 2007 while visiting Nepal and India to conduct a project as an MBA student of Stanford University. A local hospital she visited at that time had a modern incubator donated by an organization, but the device was often useless because power supply was not stable and it was complicated to operate. Premature newborns were often left outside the incubator, before dying.

A normal incubator costs at least 20,000 U.S. dollars. She joined hands with three colleagues to start a project to develop an incubator costing about 200 dollars each, or just 1 percent of the conventional ones. After testing thousands of times, they developed a heating device for newborns that can serve as an incubator. It is priced at 200 dollars as they targeted. When heated up with hot water, the device can keep the newborn’s body temperature for eight hours. It is also portable.

Chen needed stable income to be able to save more newborns. She founded Embrace Innovation in 2012, and developed a baby blanket made of textile designed to control body temperatures. Whenever a baby blanket is sold, a portion of the proceeds is used to help donate the heating device for newborns in developing countries.

Embrace Innovation has donated more than 200,000 heating devices to some 20 countries, including India, China and Kenya. Strongly believing that her company can sell more baby blankets, she said, “Why do you think people pay 2,000 dollars to buy a luxury product? It is because the product is a name brand and beautiful. Our brand is not only technologically advanced but it can also save lives.”

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