#338 - 🚀 The BiliHut: Rethinking Phototherapy with Portability and Precision

Hello friends 👋

In this Tech Tuesday episode, Dr. Donna Brezinski, founder and CEO of Little Sparrows Technologies, joins the show to talk about the BiliHut — a portable, high-intensity phototherapy device designed to treat neonatal jaundice with both clinical effectiveness and practical usability in mind.

A neonatologist by training, Dr. Brezinski explains how her clinical experiences led to the development of the BiliHut, which delivers uniform phototherapy across the baby’s body while solving key issues like positioning errors, thermal regulation, and access for breastfeeding. Unlike traditional overhead lights or fiber-optic pads, the BiliHut is engineered for both hospital and home use, with versions adaptable to low-resource settings and unreliable power grids.

The conversation covers the physics behind its design, recent clinical data on treatment time, and deployment strategies from rural U.S. areas to clinics in Mongolia and Burundi. Dr. Brezinski also outlines how clinicians and families in the U.S. can access the device through durable medical equipment providers, visiting nurse agencies, or hospital DME programs.

More information about the BiliHut and its availability can be found at littlesparrowstech.com.

Link to episode on youtube: https://youtu.be/gP9yepZcJt8

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Short Bio: Dr. Donna Brezinski graduated from Yale Medical School, completed a pediatrics residency at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and received her training in neonatology at the Neonatal-Perinatal Fellowship Program. She is the inventor of the bili-hut™, an innovation drawn from years of clinical experience taking care of newborns to provide more effective, developmentally sensitive and family-centered treatment of neonatal jaundice.

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The transcript of today's episode can be found below 👇

Ben Courchia, MD: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Incubator podcast. We are back today for an episode of Tech Tuesday, and I am joined in the studio by Dr. Donna Brzezinski. Donna, welcome to the podcast.

Donna Brezinski: Thank you very much for having me.

Ben Courchia, MD: I am a big fan of your LinkedIn page because under your name, your titles are “Dr.preneur, innovator.” I’m very jealous.

Donna Brezinski: Thank you very much.

Ben Courchia, MD: You are a neonatologist by trade. You got your degree in medicine at Yale, did your fellowship at Harvard, and worked at Boston Children’s until 2015. Since then, you’ve pursued entrepreneurship and innovation. How gratifying has this career adjustment been for you?

Donna Brezinski: It’s been incredibly gratifying and certainly unexpected. I think that’s often the case with entrepreneurs: somewhere in your profession, you encounter a problem that hasn’t been solved satisfactorily. You come up with an idea, feel passionate about it, and that’s exactly what happened to me.

Ben Courchia, MD: That’s great. You are the CEO of Little Sparrows Technologies, which is the company we’re here to talk about today. Your flagship product is the BiliHut. Can you tell us a little about what the BiliHut is and the problem you identified and tried to solve?

Donna Brezinski: The problem we’re trying to solve is improving access and affordability to high-intensity phototherapy treatment for jaundice. Jaundice occurs in about one in ten babies worldwide—around 14 million babies require treatment. Untreated, it can cause permanent brain injury, cerebral palsy, deafness, vision impairment, or even death, which is completely preventable.

In lower-resource areas, more than 100,000 babies die every year due to lack of access to high-intensity phototherapy, which is unconscionable. We know how to treat jaundice effectively, but devices that are accessible to all were missing. One or two days of light therapy can completely change a baby’s life trajectory from lifelong neurologic damage to a healthy life. I made it my mission to make this treatment accessible worldwide.

Ben Courchia, MD: The name “BiliHut” is such a good one!

Donna Brezinski: Yes, it’s a play on words. The device physically looks like a little hut over a baby bassinet. The canopy houses the light treatment. “HUT” also stands for High-Intensity Ultra Portable Treatment of Jaundice—a twofer.

Ben Courchia, MD: Some of the solutions the BiliHut provides are very interesting. Hyperbilirubinemia is frequent and has dire consequences, and phototherapy is an intervention. Your semi-circular canopy provides effective exposure, but you also designed with families in mind, which is so important for bedside care.

Donna Brezinski: Absolutely. Many people focus on light output, but efficacy also depends on the interaction of mother, care provider, and baby. Jaundice usually appears in the first week of life, when mothers are developing lactation and bonding with their babies. Treatment often separates mother and child, which is undesirable. We designed the BiliHut to be set up anywhere—hospital or home. For example, we have a clinic in outer Mongolia that developed a home phototherapy program using our device.

Features include keeping the baby’s head visible so mothers can recognize feeding cues, allowing brief interruptions for feeding without affecting therapy. A Brown University study showed average home treatment with mothers was 15 hours, faster than almost any other solution, either in the hospital or portable solutions.

Ben Courchia, MD: Phototherapy is an intervention, and it must be delivered appropriately. Often lights are moved or misaligned, but the BiliHut solves that by design.

Donna Brezinski: Exactly. Mispositioning of lights—too high, off-center—reduces effectiveness, especially in hospitals. The BiliHut has a fixed-position light array at the correct height, and the curved canopy reflects light evenly toward the baby. Even if the baby moves, therapy efficacy remains consistent.

Ben Courchia, MD: I also see potential NICU applications. We often use multiple lights and foil to achieve the same effect you achieve by default, with the semi-circle and standardized intensity.

Donna Brezinski: Yes, that was actually the inspiration. We were doing manual reflection with foil, so we designed the device to do it automatically. Thermoregulation is another key problem. Fiber optic pads often cause overheating or discomfort, so you unswaddle the baby and take them off treatment, and you see babies that need phototherapy lights for 3 or 4 days, or maybe longer. The BiliHut canopy uses reflective mylar, amplifying treatment while reflecting infrared heat, keeping babies warm. Interior chamber temperature stabilizes 7–8 degrees above ambient, perfect for near-term babies, ensuring thermal comfort alongside effective treatment.

Ben Courchia, MD: Absolutely. We’ve discussed thermal regulation on the podcast, and this is a huge advancement. How does the BiliHut compare to phototherapy pads in terms of skin exposure?

Donna Brezinski: That is the crux of the efficacy of BiliHut. Early on when we were trying to optimize the arc of the light, and even though it looks like a simple canopy, it's actually a composite of two geometric shapes. Without getting too nerdy about this, the top third of the canopy is a half cylinder. The arc is positioned over the baby so that the light converges at the center point of the baby's torso. But if we continue to do that configuration on the sides, the device would be quite wide, so it wouldn't fit in anything. So the interior support element of the BiliHut is actually shaped so that when you flex it, it doesn't flex into a half circle. It flexes into this kind of unique shape. The end result is that the design maximizes light delivery at right angles (normal incidence) to the skin. Traditional flat arrays lose effectiveness at the sides, because light reflects off curved surfaces. As you move across the contour of the baby, in the center you have a fairly intense hotspot with a planar overhead light. But as you start to move over to the sides, you dramatically lose efficacy of treatment. It's just like if you are lying in the sun at noontime, you're gonna get a pretty bad burn on your nose and in the center of your chest, but you're probably not gonna get anything on the side. It's the same exact principle. The way that we've tried to mitigate this in the NICU as practitioners is that we use more than one device. You often will see two or three devices kind of angled over the baby, which is a very expensive solution. You need more capital equipment to deliver the same therapy. But even then, it's pretty imperfect. And when you combine putting a baby in an incubator and the attenuation of light, which trying to get through the plastic and the reflection off the surface of the plastic, what you think you're delivering and what you actually deliver when you finally get to the patient could be quite different.

The BiliHut’s curved array solves that, allowing faster bilirubin conversion without multiple devices, incubator interference, or light attenuation.

Ben Courchia, MD: It looks like this project refreshed your physics knowledge.

Donna Brezinski: Yes, it did! My STEM background helped, but it really brought me back to the fundamentals of physics and biochemistry.

Ben Courchia, MD: Tell us about BiliHut Global and your commitment to global health.

Donna Brezinski: BiliHut Global has design features optimized for low-resource areas with unreliable power. We conducted human-centered design research in India and Malawi, assessing needs from tertiary centers to rural villages that had no electricity. Whatever we developed, the two major issues were durability and energy efficiency. Global operates on less than 10 watts power draw, and still will deliver a radiance of about 47 microwatts per centimeter squared per nanometer, which is essentially like double surface phototherapy. And so, there are babies in rural Burundi getting the equivalent of two Neo Blues of phototherapy running on a car battery. We can do this direct to DC current and literally run this anywhere in the world. The other thing is the durability is that we backed away from constructing this out of injection molded or plastic or thermal molded plastic, which a lot of devices are. We used robust materials similar to blood pressure cuffs—Cordura nylon with urethane coating—so devices survive harsh transport and local conditions. Unlike metal or plastic devices, this design solves “last-mile” problems in global health while maintaining aesthetics.

Ben Courchia, MD: The global version looks just as good as the original—beautiful and functional. For clinicians wanting to learn more, the website is littlesparrowstech.com. Emails can be sent to info@littlesparrowstech.com. Patients can access home phototherapy through DME providers, visiting nurses, or midwives, and some hospitals are integrating the BiliHut into discharge protocols.

Donna Brezinski: On the outpatient side, availability depends on location, but coverage by insurance is often possible. Larger DME providers, visiting nurses, midwives, and hospitals are beginning to offer BiliHuts for at-home or hospital use.

Ben Courchia, MD: Donna, congratulations on this work—it’s amazing. littlesparrowstech.com is the place to learn more about the BiliHut and other solutions. Thank you for joining us.

Donna Brezinski: Thank you. My pleasure, and thank you so much for inviting me.