Low-tech ingenuity: engineering students give babies in the developing world a better start.

In 2005, when Rebecca Richards-Kortum first visited a pediatric clinic in Malawi, she had already been researching how to solve global health problems through bioengineering. She knew one of the biggest hurdles to delivering health care in the developing world was keeping costs low. But when she stepped into the pediatric ward, other logistical realities hit home.

“I had read about the challenges, but it's another thing to visit and see that every bed has three children in it and three moms are sleeping on the floor around the bed,” she says. Often, one nurse looks after 50 small patients and tragedies routinely occur because of an overwhelmed staff. Donated, high-tech equipment sits collecting dust because once it breaks down there is no way to get spare parts to repair it.

“Every year between 9 and 10 million children under age five die throughout the world,” she says. Richards-Kortum, a bioengineer and HHMI professor at Rice University in Houston, thought she could harness the ingenuity of undergraduate engineering students to save some of those lives. She developed Beyond Traditional Borders, a program in which students design functioning prototypes of medical devices. Their designs must be low cost and something that can be manufactured locally.

Several student projects focus on improving a very low-tech but high-performance incubator to keep premature babies warm. While in Malawi, in 2006, Richards-Kortum met a resourceful pediatrician, Dr. Elizabeth Molyneux, who had designed the “Malawi hot cot” out of plywood, light bulbs for heat, a thermometer, and a dimmer switch to control the temperature. Rice students have since designed a version of the hot cot that is more thermally efficient, less expensive, and easier to build—and it has an electric temperature control with an emergency shut-off if the incubator gets too hot. The student even wrote up “IKEA-style assembly directions” so that the hot cot can be built locally in any country, says Richards-Kortum.

Other students took on another problem vexing Dr. Molyneux: she needed less expensive phototherapy lights to treat babies with jaundice. The blue lights break down the blood by-product bilirubin that causes jaundice, but a typical light set costs $2,500 and replacement light bulbs cost $300. Richards-Kortum's students used inexpensive light-emitting diodes to make a phototherapy light device for about $30; replacement bulbs cost 12 cents apiece. The portable device can be placed directly on top of the hot cots.

Richards-Kortum pulled in some Houston-area high school students to go the next step. She set up a contest for students to devise a low-cost solution to a cultural problem with the hot cots: the wooden rectangular boxes look like tiny coffins, which make parents and nurses uneasy. The winning team covered two halves of a Dollar Store hula hoop with clear plastic vinyl, to make a see-through “covered-wagon” style incubator. “It was just a creative and brilliant solution to the problem,” Richards-Kortum says.

Some of her college students travel in the summer to African and South American countries, where, in partnership with organizations that deliver health care, they try out, refine, and implement their devices. “As a faculty member, this is enormously rewarding,” says Richards-Kortum. “But for the students, it is so motivating for them to see what they are capable of doing as undergrads. It's the best thing I've ever participated in.”
—K.P.

HHMI PROFESSOR