A Low-Cost, Lightweight Portable Incubator
A Low-Cost, Lightweight Portable Incubator
A portable incubator is a small, battery-powered device that provides warmth for infants who cannot regulate their body temperature. Incubators typically have an outer chamber that keeps a constant, controlled temperature inside the inner container, and a control panel that allows healthcare professionals to adjust and monitor conditions. These devices are often used in hospital delivery rooms, where a stable environment is necessary to ensure the health of premature or sick infants.
Biological incubators are essential for cultivating mammalian cells and many selected bacterial cultures. They maintain a consistent internal temperature, control carbon dioxide levels, and control humidity. However, their high cost and size limits their use in field settings, where laboratory space is limited and tethered power supplies are not available. Consequently, researchers in these fields have developed portable incubators to facilitate their work outside the laboratory.
These portable incubators provide a convenient way to perform on-site testing and to transport temperature-sensitive samples. They are also useful for assessing microbial loads in remote lakes, where timely access to a microbiology laboratory is impractical or not possible. This research demonstrates that the design of a simple, low-cost, lightweight portable incubator can be effective for preserving samples and ensuring reliable data collection in remote environments.
A key design challenge for this project was ensuring that the portable incubators would be capable of maintaining a steady, uniform temperature during transportation. This was achieved by using a thermocouple in the outer heating chamber, connected to a Campbell Scientific CR300 datalogger. This allowed the datalogger to record and display the internal temperature of each individual incubator. A temperature-profile was then generated by plotting the data over time.
This profile showed that the temperature of each incubator remained fairly consistent, with variations attributed to external environmental conditions and the timing of sample collection. The profile also demonstrated that the portable incubators were capable of recovering quickly from a brief interruption in heating (e.g., during a simulated adding/removing of Petrifilms(tm)). In addition to monitoring the temperature, the electrical consumption of each incubator was also recorded. The average power consumption of each incubator was 2.9 W.
The results of this study demonstrate that the prototype portable incubator can be constructed in a few hours with minimal equipment and materials for a total cost of about $150 (CDN). It is ideal for use in the field for monitoring the microbial communities of lakes where timely access to a microbiology lab may not be possible or practical. This method can be extended to other remote locations, such as the far reaches of the Arctic, where this type of analysis is particularly valuable.