Each day, citizens of Ukraine face the unmistakable horrors of war. As the people experience attacks from Russian troops and bombs, somehow life still has a way of carrying on despite the death and destruction all around. In the shadow of these somber facts, more than 1,000 mothers deliver babies each day in Ukraine and the situation for these infants is critical.
That’s why Jane Chen, co-founder of the nonprofit organization Embrace Global, has a plan to help the smallest and most fragile of Ukrainian citizens. She and her colleagues want to send 3,000 specially-designed incubators to give these babies a fighting chance for survival.
“Many of these [1,000 daily] births are taking place in bomb shelters, where there is no access to life-saving medical equipment,” Chen shared in a statement on the organization’s GoFundMe page for the incubator project. “Since the war started, it’s estimated that the premature birth rate has more than doubled in major cities across the country.”
The incubators designed by Embrace Global have already saved more than 350,000 lives across the world, according to the organization’s website. The idea for the Embrace incubator came from a trip Chen made to India back in 2017, when the Stanford graduate saw firsthand how the limited access to incubator technology in small cities and villages affected newborns.
Unlike the typical incubators found in hospitals, the Embrace incubator does not require constant electricity. Within the pouch is a core material that, once melted, maintains a temperature of 98 degrees for up to eight hours. It can be reheated thousands of times and then placed in a sleeping bag, which keeps the babies warm.
“We thought back to high school physics that when a material changes phases from a solid to a liquid or liquid to a solid, it does so at one constant temperature, giving off latent heat as it changes phases,” Chen told Insider.
Chen talks about how the incubators work in this YouTube video:
Since launching the GoFundMe campaign with a goal to raise $600,000 to send 3,000 of the Embrace incubators to Ukraine, the organization is closing in on $200,000 in donations and are in the process of making and shipping the first 200 incubators to UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and other nonprofits over in the war-torn country.
To donate to the Embrace incubator fund, visit the project’s official GoFundMe page and learn more about the innovative ideas working to help save babies’ lives around the world.
This story originally appeared on Simplemost. Checkout Simplemost for additional stories.
