India’s healthcare infrastructure is dismal, and the poor spend more than half of their income to meet medical needs. Fortunately, as these three stories show, entrepreneurship is joining hands with frugal engineering to make amends.
Anapoorni is a 44-year-old mother of four, and a domestic help in Chennai’s West Mambalam. But her four children, two daughters and two sons, would have actually been five…
When Rohan Paul started working on an electronic navigation device for the visually-challenged during his under-graduation at IIT Delhi in 2005, he had no idea where the innovation would lead him.
Brilliance Pro, a phototherapy device to treat infants with jaundice, was launched by Phoenix Medical systems recently. The device has features such as Smarttilt to provide consistent intensity across the baby’s skin, regardless of the angle at which the light head is oriented.
No baby should die or be disabled because a light bulb can’t be replaced. Yet during visits to hospitals in India and other countries, Krista Donaldson often saw lifesaving phototherapy systems, used to treat infant jaundice, languishing in dusty corners because of burned-out bulbs and other seemingly simple problems.
In India, about 15 babies die every minute due to asphyxiation in maternity homes that can’t afford the costly imported infant warmers. Many midwives try and make do with table lamps — but they are a poor substitute. As a student of IIT Chennai in 1988, Sashi Kumar was asked to repair imported baby warmers for a hospital. Kumar, 49, not only fixed the warmers but also started making them on his own — his company Phoenix Medical Systems was born.