Body category

"Freeplay itself is the first company in the world intended to make electronic products for deep-rural environments." John Hutchinson, CTO of Freeplay Energy in Cape Town, South Africa, lets a tinge of irony color his comments: "I mean, we made a lot of mistakes at first, of course," he says with a laugh, "but eventually, we started to make products that really stuck, that really delivered on their promise.

"And a number of people came to us and said, 'Why don't you think of medical products because hospitals in Africa are littered with derelict Western-derived equipment. They require disposable or replaceable elements, and they're just not right for the job.' Africa, you know, is a very harsh user environment. Things break in Africa.'

"So I came across a doctor, a guy called John Wyatt, a professor of neonatology at University College of London Hospital. And he's basically my kind of brother-in-arms on this project, we've done it together. He works in a very up-tech environment and he had a bit of a crisis where he thought, 'You know I spend so much money on saving one kid's life in this high-tech environment, whereas there are children dying elsewhere for lack of appropriate care.'

"And the kinds of numbers we're talking about are this: Ninety-five percent of the infant-mortality rate happens in the developing world -- they only have five percent of the technology available to them."

Wyatt would turn out to be Hutchinson's way to the support and perspective of the medical community. The success Freeplay Energy had enjoyed until this foray into medicine had involved such products as flashlights and radios that used the company's "Eco-Charge" technology.

"John Wyatt raised some seed money for us," Hutchinson says, "through money from the Sir Halley Stewart Trust."

The trust was a canny move. Established by Sir Halley in 1924, the trust has a Christian basis and places an emphasis on awarding work  that contributes to the development of body, mind and spirit, a just environment and international goodwill. The particular concerns here are research into concepts that are innovative, pioneering and/or groundbreading, with an aim to self-sufficiency.

"With the seed money" from the trust, Hutchinson worked with Wyatt to construct a project that initially looked at three potential devices - a "pulse oxymeter" (which measures oxygen saturation in the blood of children) and a "syringe driver" (which assists in giving newborns intravenous nourishment safely) and a "jaundice pigment measurer" (to determine degrees of jaundice in infants). These are normally big chunky machines in hospitals, and we were working to make them small, and able to operate with no power

"Freeplay had become good at making tough products, and the wind-up power feature was our sweet spot. But we didn't have the resources or energy for all these medical devices."

A selection was made to go with a fetal heart rate monitor and some early testing was arranged  with Medicins san Frontiers on-site in the Philippines, arranged with the help of Dr. David Woods, University of Cape Town.  And in fact, Hutchinson now is aggressively pursuing the pulse oxymeter, as well, since the two devices are both highly important in deep-rural medical settings where infant and mother mortality is so high and sophisticated equipment -- like electricity -- is so rare.

Hutchinson uses the electronics savvy and platform of a Welsh company, Ultrasound Technologies, for the medical components of the Freeplay Fetal Heart Rate Monitor, which also provides him with the CE marking the device requires, the EU accreditation of safety required for medically approved equipment going into the developing world.

And now 57, Hutchinson recalls Freeplay's early focus on AIDS prevention. "Look, if you wanted to communicate with people in Africa about AIDS, the best way was radio. But radios have to have electricity. Chris Staines and Rory Stear recognized the potential for self-powering radios in the deep-rural setting when they heard British inventor Trevor Baylis talk about it on the BBC. And so it was in 1996 that Hutchinson, as chief technology officer, and his Freeplay associates, moved into the off-the-grid, clean-energy, self-powering line of designs for which they're known today.

Their own success eventually became a liability. "We were selling at the high-end outlets," Hutchinson says, as the American and UK markets drove new sales of the wind-up radios and as Chinese entrepreneurs mounted new competition with models of their own. "We were in the high-end stores, National Geographic, LL Bean, Discovery, Sports Authority, Radio Shack, and these mass production outfits got into Wal-Mart and Target," the great discount chains that have become dominant in many similar stories of mass competition.

The Freeplay quality benchmark, however, had been struck. "You can use one of our radios in the jungles of Brazil and pick up quality short-wave signals from thousands of miles away, intercontinental signals." Gordon Roddick of the Body Shop, who helped fund the early radio development, has told Hutchinson of a story of a Brazilian native who obtained one of the Freeplay radios "and was making a living selling people chances to listen to the radio in the jungle.

"What has continued to inspire me is that kind of story. I would look into our boxes at a radio about to go out, and think to myself, 'When this radio next sees daylight, where will it be?' It's going by ship, then donkey, then given to a man who takes it and walks a day with it to his village. His family will be watching as he opens it up, turns the handle and he gets music. And talking. And no worries about batteries. All our radios have solar panels, so he's going to put it in the sun and it plays all day."

Today leading Freeplay's technology development, Hutchinson has seen new configurations of the company and his division. An Indian partner now holds much of the manufacturing portfolio. But Hutchinson is still opening new pathways with this breakthrough entry into the maternal/delivery arena with the Fetal Heart Rate Monitor and the Pulse Oxymeter.

"I've been with this company since the beginning in 1995," he says. "And it's still about providing the benefits of modern technology to people who otherwise would be completely excluded."

Designed by:
Philip Goodwin (industrial designer); Stefan Zwahlen (electronics designer); John Hutchinson; (project leader). Cape Town, South Africa.

Additional credits:
Professor John Wyatt, University College London, United Kingdom; Dr Joy Lawn (medical research council, South Africa); Professor David Woods, University of Cape Town, South Africa.   

Produced by:
Ultrasound Technologies Ltd Wales UK.

http://www.freeplayenergy.com/

Written by Porter Anderson