CIMIT shows the future

Last night was a technophile’s dream at the Exploratorium, the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology’s name for a room full of displays hinting at the future of medicine as envisioned by its member hospitals and universities.

There was a robotic assistant for performing lung biopsies. There were radio-frequency identification devices to monitor medications at the bedside and to track surgical instruments in the operating room. There was a glove with sensors to show muscles' recovery after stroke and a device to warn before an epileptic seizure.

Then there was the incubator made out of car parts, intended for use in developing countries.

Dr. Kristian R. Olson, a pediatrician at Massachusetts General Hospital who is involved in global health and disaster response, explained how the $1,000 isolette was superior to the $38,000 model his colleagues were showing in the adjacent display of data integration for the neonatal intensive care unit.

Incubators that are donated by well-meaning Western countries can be useless in harsher environments, a lesson learned in post-tsunami Indonesia, he said.

“They work for three months, until the first power surge,” he said. “I want clinicians to say I choose this one because this will still be working in 10 years.”

The incubator was designed to be made with locally available materials, which are recognizable in the incubator on wheels. Its glass walls have the kind of latch minivan side windows use. A dome light has an alarm that sounds and blinks when the door is opened, powered by the battery that makes a car door chime.

A motorcycle battery sits in a drawer beneath the surface on which the baby lies, an energy reserve should the local power supply fail. An automobile air filter keeps the air clean, and its chamber has a window to show when it’s dirty and needs to be changed.

The car-part isolette is still being tested and improved, Olson said. The next prototype will have a way to make the unit inaccessible without having used a hand cleanser. The bottleneck that is slowing the next phase is funding.

But the isolettes will never supplant an even lower-tech form of care: a mother's warmth.

"If we're wildly successful, we're not going to detract from 'kangaroo' care," the skin-to-skin contact between mother and baby, Olson said. "The mother is the best source of heat."

The CIMIT Innovation Congress continues today at the Back Bay Events Center.