A Gift of Warmth
While it doesn’t look like R2-D2 or the other robotic stars of the silver screen, an assistive robotic device designed and built by Rice undergraduate engineering students to help stroke and spinal cord injury survivors could be an even bigger hit.
Maybe more complicated than you think when the lives of premature babies are at stake. So when a team of Rice seniors began optimizing a low-tech incubator last spring, they were determined to take every small issue seriously.
The project was a “hot cot,” a primitive device that Rebecca Richards-Kortum, director of Rice 360°, and Maria Oden, director of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, spotted being used at a hospital in Blantyre, Malawi. The original, designed by students in Kenya, used lightbulbs as the heating element and aluminum flashing on the bottom as insulation. Angled planks directed warm air into the top chamber.
“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.”
Oden instructed her team to make the device as efficient but also as inexpensive as possible. The students determined the most thermally optimal combination of design and materials by analyzing airflow to maximize heat and maintain the right amount of oxygen in the infant’s chamber, seeing how well it worked in hot and cold climates, finding the right electrical components to ensure the widest possible use and building models to test all of the above. A must for the design was that it could be constructed with materials readily available worldwide.
Learn more at ricemagazine.info/30The hot cot found a real-world trial when a team of students from Rice’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business, under mentor Marc Epstein, distinguished research professor of management, took the plans to Rwanda on spring break. Within five days, the team 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. Plans for the cots will be refined during the upcoming year based on feedback from the returning students.