TED Talk Response #5

TED Talk by Jane Chen

1. I took away many heart-warming and frustrating ideas from this video. Higher class people tend to not realize the problems in lower class countries. One major problem is lower class women giving birth to premature babies and not being able to keep them alive because they have to access to an incubator to keep the baby warm and help it develop properly. When premature babies are born, they have no way of regulating their own body temperature. 20 million premature babies are born each year and at least 4 million die. However, those who survive grow up to have serious health problems due to improper development during their early life. Many of these problems could be fixed if the babies could be kept warm. This is usually done through an incubator. But they cost up to $20,000, so they will not be available in rural areas in developing countries. Because of this, parents resort to unsafe and ineffective methods to keep them warm, showing their desperateness. Because of these problems, a solution needed to be found. The solution is a seamless, waterproof, sleeping bag looking device that you put the baby in. In the back there is a bag of wax-like substance that melts at human body temperature and will stay warm for 4-6 hours. You simply melt the wax, put in into the sleeping bag, and keep your baby warm. This device is called the Warm Embrace. Because of concerns about premature babies in third world countries, people have reached out to help them. This really inspires me. I'm amazed that these people can create such a live-saving device that is effective, portable, and affordable, and will make a huge difference in the lives of premature babies in third world countries.
2. The speaker has a very effective speaking technique. She spoke in a soft and concerned voice that really plucked some strings in my heart and the hearts of the audience members. She spoke very directly to the people listening to her, as if she was having a private conversation with each member of the audience. The way she spoke made it easy to listen to her and take her point to heart.
3. The speaker also had a very interesting presentation style. She started off by circling around the problem she wanted to discuss, then she dove right in and explained the problem, the process, and the solution and backed it up with hard facts and statistics. She also engages the audience in the presentation. When she told the people in the crowd to close their eyes and hold out their hands, I did it too. She used situations that people in the audience could connect to so that they would take to heart the issues premature babies in third world countries experience.
4. What matters in this video is the amazing persistence of Jane Chen and her team that designed a living saving device, the Warm Embrace. Because of the large costs of an incubator, premature babies born in third world countries are not provided the means they need to survive. This video connects to me because it inspires me to know that people are reaching out in many ways to families living in lower-class conditions and makes me want to do the same. This invention connects to education because it shows that a great invention doesn't have to be a large, expensive, complex device, it can be small and simple, but very effective. This connects to the world because it will save many lives of the premature babies living in third world countries.