Embrace Innovations (Organisation)
| Private | |
| Industry | Healthcare Technology |
| Founder |
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| Headquarters | Bangalore, India |
| Products | Embrace Nest, Embrace Care |
| Website | embraceinnovations |
Embrace Innovations is an India-based social enterprise, that develops disruptive healthcare technologies focused on reducing infant and maternal deaths in emerging markets. It is part of a “hybrid” organisational structure that includes Embrace, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and Embrace Innovations, a for-profit social enterprise.
Embrace’s first product is an infant warmer to regulate the temperature of vulnerable low-birth-weight and premature infants, that would give premature infants a better chance at survival. A baby born two weeks premature lacks the ability to regulate its own body temperature. The child will likely die if not transferred to an incubator within an hour. With the Embrace Warmer, which is a specially designed polymer blanket, that vital time span becomes 4 hours. The Embrace infant warmers are estimated to have helped over 50,000 babies to date, largely in India, with pilots being conducted in 10 countries.
Embrace was founded in 2008 by Jane Chen, Linus Liang, Naganand Murty and Rahul Panicker. The four founders met as graduate students at Stanford University in a Design for Extreme Affordability course, where they were challenged to design an infant incubator that would cost 1% the price of traditional incubators (about $20,000 in the US).
On a 2007 fact-finding trip to Nepal and India, the team realised their design would have to take into account the infrastructural challenges in developing countries, including unreliable power and limited skills of healthcare staff. An initial prototype was developed resembling a baby sleeping bag with a removable, heatable wax insert that prevented hypothermia in premature and low-birth-weight babies, which took into account the limitations of the developing country environment.
With initial funding from Stanford BASES Social E-Challenge and Echoing Green, Embrace was registered as a 501(c)(3) non-profit in 2008. In 2009, the team moved to Bangalore, India to further refine their prototypes and explore their intended market. Clinical trials began in 2010.
In January 2012, Embrace announced a new hybrid organisational structure. A separate for-profit social enterprise, Embrace Innovations, was spun out of the Embrace 501(c)(3) organisation to handle product design, manufacturing, and sales/distribution, primarily to governments and private clinics in emerging markets.
The company has developed two versions of the Embrace infant warmer: Embrace Nest, and Embrace Care. The infant warmers are composed of three components: an infant-sized sleeping bag or baby interface, a pouch of phase change material (PCM), and a heater. The pouch, when warmed in the heater and placed into a compartment of the sleeping bag, maintains the World Health Organisation recommended temperature of 37 °C for a period of up to 8 hours. The product was designed to complement skin-to-skin care.
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