We believe in a world where all premature babies have access to an incubator.
A baby dies every ten seconds. Help us solve this problem. Join the Nest, our community of monthly donors, to bring life-saving portable incubators to families arounds the world. To find out more, watch our video.
Over the last 100 years, the baby incubator has been one of the most influential contributions to the decline in infant mortality rate. And yet, today, a baby dies needlessly every ten seconds.
One of the biggest problems these babies face is regulating their body temperatures—which is the primary function of an incubator. But incubators are technically complex, expensive (costing $20K or more), and require a stable supply of electricity - making them prohibitive in remote parts of the world. Traditional incubators often don’t work in the world’s least advantaged vulnerable communities.
Every 10 seconds the world loses a newborn
Six babies die every minute
Three million of those babies die in the first 28 days of their life
Millions more grow up with debilitating health issues
The Solution: The Embrace Portable Incubator
The core technology of the Embrace incubator is a phase-change-material, a wax like substance, which when melted, can maintain a constant temperature of 98 degrees for up to eight hours at a stretch.
This wax pouch can be reheated thousands of times. It is then placed into a sleeping bag, where it creates a warm micro-environment for the baby.
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Embrace has already saved over 350,000 lives
Our Goal: Save 1 Million Babies by 2026
FORTUNATE
Nissima gave birth to premature twins, a boy and a girl. On her way to the hospital, her baby boy died. Her daughter was immediately placed in an Embrace incubator when she reached the hospital — and she survived. Nissima named her Fortunate because she received a warm Embrace that saved her life.
Embrace Team & Founder Story
Jane Chen, Embrace Co-Founder
In 2007, I traveled to India. I met a woman in a village, Sujatha, who had given birth to her baby two months prematurely. Sujatha took her baby to a village doctor, who advised her to go to a city hospital, where her baby could be placed in an incubator. That hospital was over 4 hours away and Sujatha did not have the money to get there. Her baby died.
Based on this story and dozens like it, my team and I realized what was needed was an incubator that could work in a village setting. It had to be portable, function without constant electricity, and be super easy to use.
We went to work brainstorming, prototyping and coming up with hundreds of iterations of our idea. Through this process, the Embrace incubator was born.
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Alanna Shaikh, Director of Operations
Alanna Shaikh has twenty years of experience in building and leading teams for rapid response to humanitarian emergencies and for long-term development of healthcare systems in low-resource situations. She has worked for USAID, International Medical Corps, Project HOPE, the World Bank and Save the Children. She’s a senior TED fellow and she holds an MPH from Boston University and a BS from Georgetown University. She has lived in seven countries, and is a published poet.
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Embrace Board Member
Jeff Schade,
Embrace Board Member
Embrace in the News
Portable Incubators Save Young Lives in Ukraine
UNICEF- July 29, 2022
Baby Sofia is just a day old. She was born in Sumy, Ukraine as air raid sirens wailed in the background. Now, against all the odds, she sleeps quietly in a warmer...The comfort and temperature of Sofia's little body is maintained by a special infant warmer. The American non-profit organisation ‘Embrace’ has provided 150 such devices* to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), which has already delivered them to hospitals in Dnipro, Sumy, Pokrovsk and other Ukrainian cities. Learn more
Premature births have tripled in Ukraine. This nonprofit is donating portable incubators
Fast Company - May 9, 2022
‘These nurses are risking their lives staying with the babies so they can be in these incubators, meanwhile buildings are getting bombed all around them,’ says Jane Chen, CEO and cofounder of Embrace Global. Learn more
