Incubation innovation: saving babies' lives

During his final year studying product design at Loughborough University, James watched a Panorama documentary highlighting the increased number of premature births in Syria due to the war. Believing there must be something he could do to improve the situation, he set about researching the technology behind incubators, exploring possibilities for improving their design.

Incubators are a vital tool for reducing mortality rates among premature babies, but traditional models are generally bulky and expensive, costing as much as £30,000. James’s inflatable MOM incubator folds up to the size of a briefcase, and is planned to cost just a few hundred pounds. With one in ten babies born premature, and 75 per cent of premature deaths believed to be preventable with incubation, the technology has the potential to be genuinely revolutionary, particularly in the developing world. But when James came up with the idea, he was by no means an expert.