James Roberts invented a portable, compact, and battery-powered incubator that has saved thousands of premature babies in war-torn Ukraine. The ‘mOm’ incubator, which is manufactured in Felixstowe, Suffolk, has become a life-saver in war-torn countries around the world since it is more compact and simpler than conventional incubators. Around 75 of the groundbreaking ‘mOm’ incubator have already been sent to the country, while its ministry of health has recently requested another 100.
The incredible invention saw Mr Roberts, 31, awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Princess Royal silver medal earlier on Sunday.
The devices are primarily deployed in hospitals and bomb shelters, where they can be run on battery power.
This is key since Ukraine has been ravaged by Russian missile and drone attacks on the country’s power plants and electricity grids.
Speaking about the impact of his invention, Mr Roberts said: “When you are sent a photograph of someone at the very beginning of their life who has been impacted by something your team has done, it’s indescribably special.
“All the difficult moments are forgotten.”
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Mr Roberts said that doctors in Ukraine started to get in touch enquiring about his devices at the start of the war.
He said: “I saw terrible reports about what was happening in Ukraine. The entire team did.
“And we knew we could do something meaningful to help.
“We heard from contacts in Ukraine that physicians were having to make the difficult choice of taking premature babies down into bomb shelters without the equipment they needed, or staying in maternity units where they risked being maimed or killed.”
Mr Roberts started sending the incubators to Ukraine in June, 2022.
The Surrey-born inventor created his incredible incubator during his final year at university in 2014.
The then-Loughborough University student was struck by scenes of premature babies dying in Syria, amid the unrest and civil war.
After watching a documentary about the crisis, Mr Roberts, who was just 22 years old, said he thought: “This is a problem I could work on that could really change things.”
Herve Verhoosel, a representative of the global health organisation Unitaid, explained why premature births are such a problem in war.
He said: “The war increases the level of stress in pregnant women, leading to an increase in premature births reported, up to three times more than before the war.”
Mr Robert’s prototype, which he developed at university, eventually caught the eye of the charitable foundation of the entrepreneur James Dyson.
In 2014, the James Dyson Foundation awarded him a global award for innovation to help develop and scale-up his incubator.
