To help poor countries, simpler health treatments not dependent on electricity

So Arye Rosen, a Drexel professor of biomedical and electrical engineering, began to work on a solution with Harel - who has a research appointment at Drexel and also works for Voorhees-based Onsite Neonatal Partners, providing neonatal care at Riddle Hospital in Media.

They made a prototype blanket embedded with dozens of blue LED lights, reasoning that an infant could be wrapped in such a blanket and not have to be separated from her mother. They later added the idea of charging the blanket with flexible solar panels, in their application to the Gates foundation, and were rewarded with a $100,000 grant.

The family has formed a small business, AMT Inc., to work on this and other projects.

"When you put an engineer and a physician in the same room, ideas go flying all over the place," Harel Rosen said, referring to himself and his father.

Cellular piggybacking

It started when actor David Morse, a friend of Rubin's, e-mailed him this year to ask about the problems in getting medical care to people in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. Among other issues, Rubin explained how vaccines had to be kept cold to remain effective.

Weeks later, Rubin was at Penn's 2010 graduation when he saw David L. Cohen, chairman of the school's board of trustees and a senior Comcast executive, sitting near Paul Farmer, a public health pioneer and an honorary degree recipient.

The juxtaposition of people from the worlds of communications and public health gave Rubin an idea: Why not use the leftover energy from cell-phone towers to power refrigerators for vaccines?

Rubin and colleague Alice Conant proposed just that in New Scientist magazine, and have been getting response from around the world, he said.

People have previously tried to come up with ways to refrigerate vaccines in rural Africa, but Rubin said such efforts had not caught on. Rather than rely on nonprofits or governments to invent a new system, he said, far better to rely on something that's already mushrooming across the developing world: the fast-growing cell-phone business.

One industry study projects the construction of 640,000 off-grid cell towers by 2012, powered by diesel generators. Such stations typically have 5 kilowatts of excess power available, plenty to run a fridge, Rubin said.

"There's an incentive for the private sector to build these cell towers," the Penn professor said. "There's an incentive to get them out to the most rural parts of the world."

Rubin has enlisted the aid of Penn engineers and Wharton students and is seeking funds for the idea. He has already spoken to cellular companies in India and aims to have a test site in place next year.

If these three projects bear fruit, they would be electrifying ideas, indeed.