Infant-incubator development began when Prof Raldi visiting his eldest-brother a medical doctor, in 1989. His brother brought a baby incubator that has been damaged. After starring sometime Prof. Raldi tried studying thedefects in the incubator. Then his brother said, “Why don’t you try to make an incubator like this, coz you know very well the technology applied on it ?” And that was the time , Prof. Raldi started thinking to develop by himself to design and manufacture the infant incubators for newborn baby.
After a longtime and wide range of research, finally in 2002 the infant incubator was completed. Furthermore, the development of manufacturing process studied more intensive, so that the innovation continues to grow rapidly. The demand of incubator even more and more increase in the country because problem of premature baby is still high.
To create a comfortable environment for premature babies, the temperature in the incubator is slightly lowered than the temperature of human body. For example, the initial temperature in the surrounding environment is 36-37oC before labour, then the incubator temperature is set to 33-34oC. Heat in the incubator comes from a heater placed under the upper side cabin, which is then supplied to the cabin using fan. The temperature inside the incubator will remain constant in accordance with the setting of the set-up controller because the setting process works automatically. For example, if the desired temperature is 34oC, then when it reaches 34oC the heater will automatically shut-off. And when the temperature has dropped to 33oC, then the heater will turn on again.
Basically this local incubators is equal with the foreign products in the same working principle. The different is in the design stylle, doors, hinges, and its heater. The uniqueness of UI’s incubator is in the point of view energy consumption. While foreign-made incubator has a high wattage, thus requiring substantial electrical energy. This is because in western countries or japan, they face a low temperatures environment, average temperature yearly could be considered 5-10 dgC. Thus requiring higher energy to raise the temperature. While in all-around Indonesia, the ambient temperature is only 28-29oC, so it does not require too much energy to raise the temperature to 33-34dgoC.
The new inisiative appeared since 2012 to produce HOME_INCUBATOR which lately called Grashof-Incubator due to a new system of naturelle convection to circulate hot air to the cabin without fan or without force. This make the power consumption reduce a lot to only 20-40 Watt for one small incubator. (Author independent, 23 July 2013).-
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