Loughborough Student Wins James Dyson Award For Incubator Designed in SOLIDWORKS

  Loughborough Design Student James Roberts secures contract with Morgan Innovation and Technology allowing them to further develop and manufacture his portable baby incubator ‘mOm’.

'Morgan Innovation and Technology’, customers of Solid Solutions, have successfully secured a contract with Loughborough University Design Graduate, James Roberts to produce his cost-effective, collapsible, portable baby incubator design. Morgan IAT have taken the winner of the 2014 James Dyson Award for innovations ground-breaking design with the expectation to take it through from concept stage to market. 

  James recognised the need for a unit which ensures a pre-term infant is kept safely incubated, whilst simultaneously offering a compact solution to store and transport to differing regions. The inspiration for the project came whilst watching a documentary on Syria which explained the issue of pre-mature children dying due to lack of incubation. This is when he came up with the idea of mOm.

mOm Is an inflatable incubator designed specifically for the developing world and to be implemented within harsh environments such as disaster zones or refugee camps. The durable incubator boasts an ability to endure harsh transportation conditions and to withstand being dropped from a plane in care packages. Another winning feature of the design is its capacity to be powered by a car battery for a period of 24 hours.

Besides the durability and lightness of the design -mOm weighs in at just 10kg! - it is also easy to transport thanks to its ability to be folded away and compacted to half its deployed size. This aids to facilitate low costs in shipping to areas where incubators are unavailable.

The mOm incubator is a small and efficient device, offering a more cost effective solution to the current incubators on the market which retail for £30,000 per unit. In contrast, mOm will cost just £250 per unit, therefore broadening the target market and making the technology accessible to both first and third world countries. 

James explains that SOLIDWORKS played an invaluable role from the initial concept stage through to the 3D printing, CNC machining and final design. Without SOLIDWORKS James doesn’t believe he could have achieved such spectacular results in the time given. Almost all elements of the incubator benefited from the capabilities of SOLIDWORKS, from assessing whether or not the volume inside the inflatable shells were large enough to ensuring the attachments for the functional aspects of the design worked how they were intended to do so.

Additionally, Morgan IAT look to push James’s design further by developing a solution to lower devise set up time and contamination costs. They plan to do this through including sterile and disposable infant compartments as an alternative to cleaning. This will eliminate the risk of liquid-related hazards which are normally present when electronics are underneath the mattress – as is the case in existing products.

As well as this and in order to optimise mOm’s thermo-dynamic design, Morgan IAT is partnering with Concentrated Heat and Momentum (CHAM) Ltd, a consultancy and software house specialising in computer simulation of fluid-flow and heat-transfer processes using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).

Chairman and Research Director, Howard Clarke said: “The mOm Incubator project allows us to expand our skills and knowledge base into another sector of the IEC 60601 Medical Electrical Equipment Safety standard. Although the incubator industry is well established with its own collateral standard (IEC 60601-2-16), the nature of this development raises some new and interesting challenges when compared with a traditional incubator design, which is what we enjoy about this type of project.”

“This product could do something great” (James Dyson)