Some of the most important innovations in pediatric healthcare aren’t built for the best-equipped hospitals in the wealthiest cities. They’re built for the places where nothing works the way it should, and where getting it wrong means a child doesn’t survive. This episode features two people working in exactly those places.
An Incubator That Goes Anywhere: James Roberts on mOm Incubators
James Roberts grew up playing with Lego and motorbikes. He trained as a design engineer. And then, as a student working on his final degree project, he encountered a statistic that changed the direction of his career: more than a million children die every year because of premature birth, and in many parts of the world, the barrier between life and death is access to an incubator.
Preterm birth is now the largest cause of death in children under five globally. For every one degree Celsius lost in body temperature, the risk of mortality increases by 28%. The technology that addresses this, the conventional neonatal incubator, weighs around 150 kilograms, costs tens of thousands of pounds or dollars, requires specialized training to operate, and breaks down.
James’s solution was a collapsible, inflatable incubator that weighs 20 kilograms, can be operated with a single button by a single clinician, and can be folded down, shipped anywhere, and deployed wherever it’s needed. It was his final degree project. It won the James Dyson Award. It is now CE marked and FDA cleared, and has reached an estimated 15,000 patients across seven countries, from NHS hospitals in the UK to air raid shelters in Ukraine to field hospitals in Gaza and Sudan.
The design philosophy behind mOm is simple and radical at the same time: if you build for the most challenging environment, you build something that works everywhere. A device robust enough for a conflict zone is more than robust enough for a level-one maternity unit in the UK. And a device that can be operated by a less-specialized practitioner in a field hospital can also be operated at the bedside of a mother in a maternity ward, keeping a low-acuity NICU baby close to their parent rather than transferring them up the ward.
At Liverpool Women’s Hospital, one of the UK’s major maternity units, a study presented at the largest pediatric conference showed that mOm’s incubators delivered equivalent or better clinical outcomes while saving the hospital £65,000 per year per system. By keeping lower-risk babies in maternity and transitional care rather than transferring them to NICU, the incubators freed up NICU capacity for sicker children, promoted mother-baby bonding, and were associated with reductions in respiratory distress syndrome.
The business model is evolving too: away from capital expenditure and toward an operational rental model with unlimited warranty, a structure that makes the technology accessible to the health systems that need it most, and aligns the company’s incentives directly with the device actually working.
James’s broader vision is for the mOm incubator to become the hub of a connected care ecosystem, a platform to which cameras, sensors, and AI-based monitoring tools can attach, all feeding into a single data portal, so that clinicians spend less time managing equipment and more time caring for babies.
Healthcare as an Act of Humanity: Shadi Martini on Multifaith Alliance
In 2011, Shadi Martini was the general manager of a hospital in Aleppo, Syria. As demonstrations spread and the Assad regime began targeting anyone who provided medical care to perceived opponents, his hospital became a clandestine refuge, a place where wounded civilians could receive treatment under cover, where a four-year-old shot by government forces could be coached by his family on what to say so that the men with questions would leave.
Shadi built a covert network of physicians, secret clinics, and smuggled medical supplies. In 2012, the network was discovered. He fled.
From Bulgaria, close enough to the Syrian border to coordinate aid, and a transit point for refugees making the dangerous overland journey to Europe, he continued his work. He eventually connected with Multifaith Alliance, an organization founded by Dr. Georgette Bennett, a child of Holocaust survivors, who asked what the Jewish community could do for the Syrian crisis. Shadi, a Muslim Syrian, became her partner in building something that defied easy categorization: a humanitarian organization built on the radical premise that people of different faiths and backgrounds could care for one another across every line that conflict tries to draw between them.
Today, MFA operates primary healthcare clinics, outpatient facilities, and mobile health units across Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Guatemala, Iraq, and Lebanon. In a single year, the organization has reached nearly 80,000 people through its programs, which span nutrition services, reproductive health, family planning, free medication distribution, and a prenatal vitamin program, formulated specifically for the region’s needs, in a halal formula, distributed across Syria.
MFA deliberately seeks out the places other organizations don’t reach, the air-gap areas where funding doesn’t flow because the environment is too dangerous, too remote, or too politically complex. They bring modular clinics. They employ local doctors, nurses, and midwives. They distribute medications not just to their own facilities but to other organizations and facilities operating in the same regions.
Shadi is also focused on what he calls the full environment of health for displaced communities, not just clinical access, but the conditions that make health possible. He describes working to refurbish homes for returning displaced families: restoring bathrooms, kitchens, windows, and heating, because a child’s mental and physical health requires a place they can call home. He describes distributing whistles to children in refugee settlements who have to navigate dangerous conditions at night.
What makes him optimistic, despite everything, is simple: the evidence of his own experience. That people he was raised to regard with suspicion reached out to him in his darkest moments and helped. That attitudes change when people witness unexpected compassion across lines of faith or ethnicity. That most people, everywhere, want the same things, to live a normal life, to raise their children, and to be safe.
Key Topics Discussed:
- Preterm birth as the leading cause of death in children under five globally
- The design philosophy behind the mOm incubator: building for the hardest environment
- CE and FDA clearance as signals of quality in humanitarian settings
- Clinical outcomes data from Liverpool Women’s Hospital
- Expanding the NICU footprint without expanding physical real estate
- The shift from capital expenditure to rental-based medical device models
- The Syrian conflict and the origins of Multifaith Alliance
- Covert medical networks in conflict zones
- Multifaith humanitarian cooperation across religious and ethnic lines
- Primary healthcare and outreach in conflict and displacement settings
- Prenatal nutrition programs for displaced populations
- The role of shelter and environment in children’s health
- Humanitarian diplomacy and shifting perspectives across communities
About James Roberts:
Co-Founder and CEO of mOm Incubators Ltd. mOm’s vision is to accelerate access to smarter healthcare technology for children. CE mark granted and currently impacting lives. Raised from Angels, Family Offices and VC.
About Shadi Martini:
The Syrian war transformed businessman Shadi Martini into a refugee, an activist, and a leading advocate for greater cooperation across faith and cultural lines in support of the Syrian people. In March 2011, as the Assad regime cracked down on those providing aid to anyone suspected of opposition ties, Shadi, then the General Manager of a hospital in Aleppo, and his colleagues worked covertly to deliver medical care to wounded and ill civilians.
After being forced to flee Syria in 2012, Shadi became a refugee in Turkey, where he continued his humanitarian work by establishing networks to provide medical care and humanitarian assistance to Syrian refugees. His firsthand experience of displacement, combined with his deep understanding of the region’s complexities, uniquely qualifies him to lead MFA’s humanitarian efforts.
As CEO of Multifaith Alliance, Shadi oversees all aspects of the organization’s work, from humanitarian aid delivery to advocacy and partnership-building. His leadership has been instrumental in expanding MFA’s reach to serve refugees and displaced communities across multiple regions, including Syria, Ukraine, Gaza, and beyond.
Shadi’s personal journey from successful businessman to refugee to humanitarian leader embodies the resilience and determination that MFA seeks to foster in the communities it serves. His story is a powerful reminder of the human cost of conflict and the critical importance of international cooperation in responding to humanitarian crises.
