An innovative medical product MiraCradle (TM) – Neonate Cooler

An innovative medical product MiraCradle (TM) – Neonate Cooler, an affordable device for treating NEO NATAL BIRTH ASPHYXIA designed by our company DESIGN DIRECTIONS PVT. LTD. for Pluss Advance Technologies has won the PRESIDENT’S AWARD for Successful Commercialization of Indigenous Technology.

The device does not require electricity to operate and hence extremely relevant in rural areas and mobile hospitals.

Birth Asphyxia is the second largest cause of newborn deaths globally accounting for more than 600,000 newborn lives. India alone accounts for more than 125,000 deaths annually.

Neonatal cooling or Therapeutic Hypothermia (THT) is the standard of care for birth asphyxia treatment. However, the only device available to perform the cooling treatment is imported and costs more than Rs. 20 lacs which cannot be afforded by most hospitals in India, and especially in Rural Hospitals.

MiraCradle(TM) – Neonate Cooler is a CE marked affordable cooling device, developed in collaboration with Christian Medical College, Vellore.

MiraCradle ( TM) – Neonate Cooler uses the advanced savE phase change material (PCM) technology to induce therapeutic hypothermia among newborns suffering from birth asphyxia. It is easy to use, safe, lightweight, portable and gives the precise temperature control of 33-34⁰C for a period of 72 hours with minimal manual supervision and no requirement of constant electricity supply. It costs less than 1/8th of the currently imported electronic devices

MiraCradle(TM) has been commercialized successfully. It is present in more than 130 hospitals across India and more than 1,000 babies have been treated. It is also being exported to South Africa, Kenya and Turkey. Exports shall soon start to Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Uganda, Zambia, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand.
www.miracradle.com

Design Thinking

Design thinking can make our lives better in small and big ways

(This article in #JargonJungle series was first published on bloncampus.com here )

In this era of start-ups, even established companies are rushing to bring new products to market to avoid being disrupted. There are companies that wish to capture value better before others do. All this calls not just for ideas, but also sustained efforts to actually develop and deliver newer and newer offerings, and solve problems in new ways. So, it is quite likely you will find yourself in situations like the ones mentioned below:

~~ You are in a team developing a medical product such a a Live Camera Monitor that shows images from tiny cameras (arthroscopy) inserted in a patient’s body. This product is used by surgeons and their attending staff, such as operating room nurses.

~~ You are in a team that is formed to solve drinking water shortage in a community in a remote village.

~~ You are working on a project to help artisans, such as textile weavers, develop products for urban markets.

~~ Your company is a start-up in the healthcare sector. Your mission is to dramatically improve healthcare for senior citizens. You aim to offer solutions to prevent injuries from falls and the need for difficult surgeries for senior citizens.

~~ Impressed with traditional cuisine in India because of its time-tested health benefits, youwant to develop recipes for food items such as pizzas and pastries, but with traditional Indian ingredients.

~~ Your company offers innovative enterprise solutions based on a sophisticated technology platform. You wish to communicate this to decision-makers who are not necessarily familiar with the technology.

~~ You eat, drink and sleep games. You wish to develop a computer or a mobile game yourself.

~~ You want to develop a solution for the continuous monitoring of a semiconductor chip fabrication plant. The plant has hundreds of motors, pumps, valves and other devices. Device failures are very costly and the expert manpower to diagnose and maintain them is rare, and expensive.

Products, services, experiences

How will you handle the kind of projects described above? How will the projects be conceived and planned? What kind of people would be needed? How will you collaborate? Many things need to come together for executing such a project. They are:

~~ Fresh thinking: You will agree that there is a need to break fresh ground. Even if you are familiar with the sector (for example, healthcare, gaming), you need to think afresh.

~~ Multi-disciplinary experts: You need people from various fields to come together with a common goal. The experts will also need to be ready for fresh-thinking.

~~ Goal: You need a statement that defines what you are going achieve at the end of the project. This can be a broad statement like “we will develop a suite of products to protect senior citizens from fall related injuries” or a more specific one, such as: “we will develop a hip protector for senior citizens”. Project brief detailing specifications, timelines, markets, budgets and the like, need to be developed from the get go.

~~ Project team and a leader: You need a core team of people who will work on the project from start to finish. You’ll need a leader who is not only a good thinker, but is also the one who encourages everyone to think and contribute. The leader must be a no-nonsense task master.

~~ Project philosophy: The project plan must be based on sound principles. It needs to address these questions. How will you define goals? How will you familiarise and empathise with users? How will you define problems? How will you ‘model’ various realities? How will you ideate solutions? How will you test the problem definitions as well as likely solutions? How will you assess and handle risks? How will you test-market and update the products? How will you communicate and collaborate? A project plan can be prepared based on answers to these questions.

Design Thinking

Design thinking, which involves the various iterations of empathising, generating ideas, prototyping, and testing, needs to occur at all stages of the above kind of projects. For example, a goal or problem definition can be improved using design thinking. One can do a few iterations involving multiple ways of defining the goal. A common mistake is to define goals influenced by what is obvious. One can miss huge opportunities for fresh thinking because of such mistakes. Design thinking can be applied to testing methods as well.

Design thinking need not be limited to creating a product or communication. Every team member needs to be reasonably comfortable with design thinking. Designers can help you with design thinking in addition to making their specialist contribution in research, problem definition, ideation, designing form or communications, prototyping and testing.

This need not be limited to big development projects like the ones mentioned above. It is useful, even in small projects, and need not be limited to designers.

What were they thinking?

Have you ever come across such situations? You notice that more than half the buttons on TV remote seem unnecessary. You have to squint and sprain your neck before you can read and adjust the cooling regulator in your fridge. Your WiFi router settings make you fret. You find it hard to recall how exactly you changed the line spacing in MS Word two days back or how it got changed.

You swipe your ATM card, enter PIN, choose language, punch some keys, choose savings or current account (why?), enter amount to withdraw and wait… only for it to tell you that you PIN was wrong, and forcing you to go through the steps all over again. Google Maps on your phone shows the road upside down no matter how much you shake it (that helpful compass needle isn’t there anymore after updates).

You fiddle with the door latch on your way out and it locks so securely that your host must step in. You try to turn the door knob and your fingers get hurt between the knob and the door frame. When coming down in an elevator, you are not sure of which button to press to get to the floor where you came in from because you now discover that there are buttons marked L, LL, P1, P2.

You can’t break the seal on a new LPG cylinder and, when you do, you are not sure if the new cylinder has been securely connected to your stove’s tube. You can’t make out which way the cylinder valve opens because the tiny arrows are embossed on black knob and they are just black lines on black.

The two pins of your phone charger don’t match with two holes in your electric socket. You are in a mobile application with your phone in one hand and an umbrella (or a sandwich) in the other, and you now need to touch those three dots diagonally across the screen from where you thumb is to unlock your phone or the application.

These are some minor irritants that have workarounds, and we can put up with them. But they do make you wonder, ‘What were they thinking?’ It’s obvious that what they were not thinking of was good design.

Design thinking is for everyone; it can make our lives better in small and big ways.

Article written by Hemant Karandikar. Visit his Linkedin Profile

“This article was published at https://leadtoregenerate.wordpress.com/2016/08/12/design-thinking/

For more such articles, visit the authors’ blog at https://leadtoregenerate.wordpress.com/“

JargonJungle: Thinking outside the box

Thinking outside box is not an airy-fairy affair that means just looking at the blue sky.

This article was first published on bloncampus.com http://www.bloncampus.com/columns/jargon-jungle/use-the-right-box-for-innovation/article8756314.ece in my fortnightly columns titled ‘Jargon Jungle”

“Think innovatively outside the box,” he exhorted his colleagues. Clearly, Chetan was in a hurry. The team leader ran a brainstorming session to come up with ideas for a new app, that would help his company engage better with its customers.

But while he casually threw around the words, in his hurry, he overlooked the fact that innovating isn’t very different from thinking outside the box. Perhaps he wanted to place a ‘double’ emphasis.

Whatever his reason, the world seems to be placing increasingly greater emphasis on ‘thinking outside the box’ or innovation. This kind of thinking also enables one to use cutting-edge technologies innovatively in solutions such as remote patient care or student-centred learning.

Know your ‘boxes’

The most popular method of ‘thinking outside the box’ is by running a brainstorming session. But what really happens in a typical session? Consider Chetan’s group as one ‘box’ and their conference room as another box.

People in a group put a limit on what can be said or thought. To understand this, simply observe what happens if one of the team members walks in late or someone from another group is called in. You will notice a shift in the conversation. This change is more evident when a boss walks in or leaves the room.

There are other invisible ‘boxes’ that restrict our thought process — an individual, a team, a department, company, markets, social and cultural practices, and ignorance of technology, among others. However, we aren’t all that conscious of such boxes.

A conference room, through its familiar walls, posters, pictures and even window blinds, cues us to a familiar thinking pattern, due to its sameness and familiarity. You notice this only when you get out of it.

Without being aware of various ‘boxes’, it is impossible to think outside them.

A big enough box

While ‘thinking outside the box’ needs a box that is big enough, one must ensure that it isn’t too big. Let me illustrate this.

Too big a box for Chetan’s group would be thinking in the context of a totally different business model or a totally different technology platform. If ideas are not feasible, the brainstorming sessions are bound to be useless. It is important to find out more about the ‘big box’ before you start jumping outside the smaller ones. You can start by asking questions like:

~ How would I define the aim or the problem more clearly? (How is customer engagement measured?)

~ How much time do you have to show results? (When is the app needed?)

~ How much of a budget do you have?

Perhaps you can start the session with a discussion on the Big Box definition. The above questions will lead to more questions, which will in turn help in productive thinking.

Demolishing small boxes

Having defined the Big Box, you have start demolishing the smaller boxes. Here’s how you can do that.

Set a different perspective; ask people to play a customer and watch what happens; use a tool like Edward De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, which helps people leave their personal boxes aside and think without inhibition.

Another powerful tool is to devote some time to only asking questions. Avoid spending time in answering them initially.

Here are some questions that can be asked in Chetan’s group: ‘Why would customers want to be engaged with us?’, ‘What will they get through engagement?’, ‘What will we get through it all?’, ‘What is meant by engagement?’ and so on.

No walk in the park

They say innovation or creativity is fun. This may be true for some who genuinely enjoy it. Or it could be also because of the way it is portrayed — companies like Alphabet or Apple make it appear fun. It is certainly cool to be a designer or an engineer who creates something new that gets talked about.

But while the outcome of thinking outside box is exciting and fun, the creative process itself isn’t a walk in the park. It is like sweating and gasping through a hard climb to find the exhilarating breeze at the peak. Not everyone enjoys the climb; some may find it too daunting.

Thinking outside box is not an airy-fairy affair that means just looking at the blue sky. You have to set up conditions, painstakingly navigate many questions, and rigorously harvest discussions.

Thinking outside the box needs a big box, some rough rules of moving about, and someone who leads the project with clear goals, flexibility of tools, and the tenacity of a trekker — someone who considers pattern-busting thoughts a reward in itself.

• Article written by Hemant Karandikar. Visit his Linkedin Profile

“This article was published at https://leadtoregenerate.wordpress.com/2016/06/28/jargonjungle-thinking-outside-the-box/

For more such articles, visit the authors’ blog at https://leadtoregenerate.wordpress.com/“

Work-life Balance

These days, when you feel fatigued and dull all the time, you don’t say things like ‘I am overworked and underpaid’, or that ‘I am working like a dog’. Neither do you say ‘I have lousy habits like being a couch or chair potato’; nor do you say ‘I am not healthy’. Instead, you spout a bit of jargon that’s so generic that no one really asks you what’s wrong — you just say ‘I don’t have a work-life balance’.

It might mean you have absolutely no idea what is wrong with you.

You have a feeling that this ‘balance’ is just a question of taking off the ‘work bricks’ from one pan and adding ‘dollops of life’ on the other. You do this and voila! You have balance!

But this is obviously not true. Jargon is jargon because it tends to hide the problematic reality, obscures diagnosis, and therefore prevents corrective action. And using ‘work-life balance’ to describe a complex situation does all three. Maybe your problems don’t have anything to do with ‘balance’.

Problems at work

The reality could be that you’re suffering from bad work. There can be many causes for this.

Maybe your employer believes that to get the company’s money’s worth, you must put in long working hours, your weekends and holidays included. Maybe you hate your work. Or maybe you like your work, but you have to put in a lot of effort to get results.

It could also be that you don’t enjoy your work because everyone gets away with delays and shoddy work, leaving you to clean up after them, since you are the last in the chain. It may be that you don’t have cooperative colleagues. Perhaps a tough market is causing difficulties.

Or it is possible that your work requires you to make compromises about your values.

Difficult life

Alternatively, you could be unhappy outside your work as well.

Perhaps you don’t spare much thought for others, including those close to you. Or you don’t express your feelings. It is possible that you don’t have anyone whom you can confide in and share your weaknesses, fears or dark thoughts.

Possibly, you don’t exercise regularly; you aren’t learning anything new or you aren’t doing anything differently. There might be some health issues, niggles, or bad habits which you have swept under the carpet.

Others may think that you are selfish or unreliable, which is why they keep away from you. It is possible that you get more tired by thinking about the unpleasant tasks than by actually doing them.

A big possibility is that your ‘bad work’ is spilling over to your ‘life’ and is causing problems.

You may not even know why your energy levels are low, why you are irritable, or why you suffer from mood swings. When you use jargon like work-life balance, it prevents you from taking a good, long, hard look at yourself.

Elusive balance

Unless you investigate the causes behind your bad work or difficult life, any amount of ‘work-life balance’ initiatives by your HR will be of no use.

But even before you begin to investigate, you must recognise and accept your reality. A chat with a good friend or your spouse or a professional counsellor might help. You may also consider online tools that help you find out more about yourself.

Work-life balance is not about avoiding hard work — it can’t be achieved by slogging until you are 35 to make a fortune and then retiring — in all likelihood, you will retire with a lifelong lifestyle disease!

The balance we need is not that of two pans and a pointer in the middle. That’s dead balance.

The balance we need is that of a runner who enjoys his movement, or that of a musician who enjoys his performance. The balance we need is that of working hard and well, followed by rest as one savours the sweet exhaustion that comes with doing a good job. All of us know what that is.

Whether in sports, at work, or in life, such a balance is difficult to achieve. And it happens only if we practise to set up conditions of balance and then let go.

Conditions for balance

We must work well and long — but not so hard as to get fatigued and not so little that it makes us feel worthless. We need to be in a zone that is between the two extremes.

What causes us to work too hard? Ego or pride (need to show off), fear (I will lag behind), less skill, less knowledge, less experience, wrong methods, wrong tools, and attitude mismatch are a few reasons.

What causes laziness? Fear of failure, dislike for the work, energy or health issues, and wrong attitude could make you dull.

The prevention

Naturally, we need to prevent any of the above conditions that either make us work too hard or too little. If we can identify the specific causes, we know what to do to set conditions for balance.

We must also realise that there are certain things we can’t change — at least in the short term. We must learn to accept them. Such situations hold important learning opportunities for us.

We need to take responsibility for our own work-life balance. No one else can do this for us.

” This article was published at https://leadtoregenerate.wordpress.com/2016/06/01/work-life-balance/
For more such articles, visit the authors’ blog at https://leadtoregenerate.wordpress.com/“