From Prototype to Preparedness: The Story Behind Carecubes

I’ve spent most of my career at Otherlab working on advanced manufacturing, clean energy, and robotics. A decade ago, it was that work in robotics that unexpectedly brought me into the world of pandemic preparedness.

In 2014, when the Ebola outbreak hit West Africa, the Department of Defense asked us to help with containment. Through a DARPA contract, we were tasked with exploring immediate interventions. That’s when we began rethinking personal protective equipment (PPE).

The traditional approach – wrapping doctors and nurses in layers of gear – was slowing down care. In hot clinics, donning and doffing limited the amount of time providers could spend with patients. We asked a different question: instead of constraining the mobile caregiver, why not surround the immobile patient? That inversion of the PPE problem became the foundation of Carecubes.

From the start, we leaned into rapid prototyping.

At Otherlab, we modified laser cutters and built heat-press machines so we could iterate quickly. Friends and family, including my sister, stepped into early prototypes. Frontline doctors and nurses gave us candid feedback. That back-and-forth between engineers and clinicians never stopped. If “co-design” ever applied, it’s here—both groups were excited to build something that reflected their needs and intuitions.

Many of the big ideas were there from the beginning.

The defining feature of the Carecube that we kept is what we call the “hug wall.” It allows providers to use gloved arms to reach into the unit and lets patients see more than a sliver of a masked face. During Ebola, doctors sometimes wore photos of themselves pinned to their gowns so patients would remember there was a human on the other side. Carecubes makes that connection real, in the moment. That still excites me most: it restores humanity to care.

There are deeply technical elements too. Air handling is critical. You need negative pressure to pull potentially infectious air inward, filtration to scrub particles, and enough fresh air for patient comfort. Waste handling is another challenge. Every fluid in and out of the unit has to be safely managed. These are not easy problems, but solving them well is what makes the Carecube safe and scalable.

Looking ahead, I see two essential uses: the first is rapid deployment in the earliest stages of an outbreak, treating the first thousand cases of something like Ebola or a new airborne pathogen. The second is integration into hospitals for the surge moments that follow, when thousands or millions of patients need care without overwhelming staff or spreading infection further.

And beyond outbreaks, the possibilities excite me even more: from surgeries complicated by antibiotic-resistant bacteria to everyday infection control in hospitals and clinics.

What began as a DARPA experiment in 2014 has become a certified medical device, shaped over ten years by engineers, doctors, nurses, and the Carecubes team. I’m proud of what we’ve built together, and optimistic about where it goes next.

There is a whole world of possibilities ahead.