Built for the babies who need skin-to-skin care the most,
and are the hardest to give it to.
“One hour of skin-to-skin care is still 23 hours of separation.”
Everyone in neonatal care agrees skin-to-skin matters. Yet the smallest, sickest infants, the ones with the most to gain, are the least likely to receive it.
We start from a different premise. Separation is not a neutral default. That reframe came out of Dr. Itamar Nitzan’s research on preterm heart function, and it shapes everything we build. So we set out to understand why separation happens in the NICU, and what it would take to end it.
That work brought together neonatologists, nurses, developmental psychologists, incubator industry leaders and award-winning medical device designers. Together, we work to understand and overcome every barrier standing in the way of skin-to-skin, so that one of the most powerful interventions in neonatal care reaches every baby who needs it.
To create the medical and technological infrastructure that makes immediate, prolonged skin-to-skin care, already the recommended standard, possible and practical for the smallest preterm infants, globally.
A NICU rebuilt around human connection, where:
- Immediate, prolonged skin-to-skin care is the default for every baby, starting with the most fragile
- Parent and baby are treated as one symbiotic unit, a dyad
- Parents are caregivers and patients in their own right, not visitors to their own child’s care
The people behind Skincubator
Medtech leader in women’s health. Medical anthropology, human-centred design.
Senior neonatologist, Shaare Zedek. Originator of the device concept.
Red Dot and Good Design awards.
Medical-device quality and regulatory leadership across the US, EU and Israel.
Board and advisors
Recognition
How we built it
Over four years, we worked alongside NICU nurses, neonatologists, therapists, and families from across the US, Europe, Australia and around the world, spending hundreds of hours in practice. We mapped more than 40 barriers to immediate, prolonged skin-to-skin care and condensed them into six jobs that must happen for it to work. Then we designed a device to do all six.
Get in touch
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