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Beyond Traditional Borders students spreading warmth around the world this summer
Rice University students are spreading warmth around the world as they bring their plans for the Hot Cot – a low-cost warming crib for neonatal care – to developing nations this summer.
A team of recent Rice graduates spent the school year refining the Hot Cot to make it cheap and easy to build in as many places in the world as possible while maximizing benefits to infants. Lindsay Zwiener, Mimi Zhang, McKenzie Smith, Richard Romeo and Larissa Charnsangavej developed their project at Rice's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) under the supervision of Maria Oden, director of the facility and professor in the practice of engineering.
"The original Hot Cot design didn't come from us," said Oden. "Rebecca (Richards-Kortum, director of Rice 360°) and I found it at a hospital in Blantyre, Malawi, and they got the design from a student team in Kenya. I tasked my team with optimizing the design. Make it as inexpensive as you can, but work as efficiently as possible."
"It fills a niche between having nothing and having an incubator," Richards-Kortum said. "It's really designed for low-resource settings to keep premature babies sufficiently warm."
The Hot Cot is a standalone unit of plywood and Lexan that incorporates a heating chamber below the infant's bed and vents that allow heat to rise through the top chamber and out. Simple on-off switches control four light bulbs, giving clinicians a way to regulate the amount of heat passing through. It works in tandem with another Rice-developed device, a portable bili light designed by Rice student Yiwen Cui that helps cure children of jaundice.
Zhang said the team built models to analyze airflow, maximize heat and maintain the right amount of oxygen in the infant's chamber, and to test the cot for hot and cold climates. The cots had to be built of materials that would be easily obtained in as many part of the world as possible.
Their plans got a real-world trial when a team of students from Rice's Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, under mentor Marc Epstein, distinguished research professor of management, took them to Rwanda on spring break. Within five days, they found a way to get a cot built by local carpenters, demonstrated it briefly in a clinic and worked with local officials to begin to obtain regulatory approval.
Smith said the cots are intended for infants born at 30 weeks and up. "We recognize kangaroo care, where premature babies are held by the mother or a relative skin-to-skin for most of the day, is the preferred method of warming in developing countries, and it's been recognized by Western medicine as being better than incubators," she said. "But there are cases where an infant is very small or very sick or can't take the stimulus of being held constantly.
"That's what we expect this to be used for, when babies are too small to be warmed by kangaroo care, or when relatives are not available."
Zwiener is spending her summer building Hot Cots in Nicaragua and Guatemala. Other Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB) interns will take the plans to Ecuador, Haiti, Uganda, the Dominican Republic, Lesotho, Myanmar, Tanzania and Swaziland.
For more information or to schedule an interview, contact David Ruth at 713-348-6327 or druth@rice.edu.