Embrace, a Stanford-grown San Francisco social enterprise, has developed a baby warmer designed to keep newborns warm during the first few days of life.

This warmer is the first product developed by Embrace co-founders Jane Chen M.B.A. ‘08, Rahul Panicker ’04 M.S. ‘08, Naganand Murty M.S. ‘08 and Linus Liang M.S. ’09, who started the project together as graduate students in Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability course.

The warmer is still in clinical trials and will be released for the first time to the market in early 2011 in India, where 40 percent of the world’s low birth-weight babies are born, before the product is released internationally.

The warmer helps prevent the serious consequences of lack of warmth, including increased risk of infection and the potential for organs to shut down, diabetes, heart disease, low IQ and, in many cases, death. Underweight or premature babies are particularly susceptible to dying from lack of warmth because they have less body fat than other babies. Every year about 4 million babies born premature or underweight die during the first four weeks of life.

Embrace’s warmer is expected to cost between $100 and $200. Typical incubators in developed countries can cost as much as $20,000, and those in developing countries can cost $1,000 to $2,000.

The warmer consists of a nylon sleeping bag with an interior pouch for a wax-filled heating pad. The pad is filled with phase-changing wax that melts at about 37 degrees Celsius–human body temperature–and remains at a constant temperature for four to six hours, according to Rajan Patel ’09, Embrace’s fulltime product design manager. It can be heated with an electric heater or with warm water.

A lack of seams on the inside of the warmer facilitates sterilization and the warmer features a flap at the baby’s feet that can be quickly opened to let nurses check body temperature.

Panicker said mothers he has worked with in the trials are often reluctant to take the baby out of the warmer because the device has enabled them to get uninterrupted periods of rest for the first time after a “fairly exhausting” delivery.

“Basically the babies sleep extremely well like this,” Panicker said. “It’s like a warm cocoon. They feel like they’re in their mother’s womb.”

While some entrepreneurs take current products and strip them down to make them more cost-efficient, Embrace takes a different approach.

“We didn’t just take existing incubators and cost-reduce,” said CEO Chen of Embrace’s design process. “We tried to think about the product in an entirely different setting–for example, the needs of rural mothers.”

The warmer first began as an in-clinic and transport device for doctors and nurses. However, observation of the unmet needs of rural families in Nepal led the team to tackle developing a second, at-home model for mothers in rural areas.

While the basics of the two warmers will be the same, the at-home prototype will be heated with warm water instead of electricity, have more built-in safety features to minimize the potential for misuse, and will be less expensive than its in-clinic counterpart.

Mothers in rural areas will sometimes attempt to warm their babies by wrapping them in blankets, surrounding them with warm water bottles, or placing them under light bulbs. None are usually sufficient solutions, and the light bulbs sometimes shatter over the babies.

The at-home version will also have more wax in its warming pouch so that constant temperatures can be maintained for longer time periods, in case of an emergency trip to the hospital.

In addition to selling and renting warmers to hospitals and families, Embrace will likely cater to government and NGOs that train community health care workers, which have both expressed interest in the product.

“Almost every day we get e-mails from Africa or Asia and that they have an NGO and that they’re eager to try the device,” Patel said.

Embrace plans to use profit from the baby warmer to help fund the creation of a line of highly affordable medical devices for rural areas and the developing world. Chen said Embrace is also considering moving into a hybrid model with for-profit and nonprofit components.

To Panicker, there is one simple reason the warmer has made it this far: the complete dedication of the founders to stick with the project, which has meant moving to different countries and giving up higher-paying jobs.

“The team was willing to quit their jobs and move countries to do this full time as opposed to, ‘I think I’ll do this part time and see where this goes,’” Panicker said. “Few global issues are tackled through part-time effort.”

Contact Kathleen Chaykowski at [email protected].