Leading Research Hospital Receives 5,000 Hours of Technical, Research and Innovation Services
from TCS
Tata Consultancy Services, (TCS), a leading IT services, consulting and business solutions organization, has donated 5,000 pro bono technical and scientific research hours to Seattle Children’s Center for Intergrative Brain Research ,in a collaborative effort to discover the causes of Sudden Unexpected Infant Deaths (SUID), which includes Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).
Seattle Children’s is one of the top five pediatric research centers in the United States. A portion of the pro bono hours committed by TCS has already been used for building a digital fundraising platform, “ First Steps for SIDS”, to raise awareness and research funds for Seattle Children’s. Additional projects will be announced in the coming months.
According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, in the US, roughly 6 out of 1,000 children die before their first birthday. Of these, about 4,000 infants, or 1 in 6, die each year of unexpected causes. Within this larger umbrella, SIDS remains the leading cause of death among children from one month to one year of age, with 90 per cent of SIDS deaths occurring within the first six months of life.
John Kahan, President of the Aaron Matthew SIDS Research Guild at Seattle Children’s Hospital said,“This is an incredibly generous donation by TCS and its employees”.
“We are deeply grateful for TCS’ commitment to this work to ensure that, in the future, no parent experiences the loss of a child again or worries theirs will be next.”
Nagaraj Ijari, VP and Global Head, HiTech Unit, TCS said,“At TCS we firmly believe in leveraging technology to provide solutions to social causes, and we are excited to work with Microsoft and Seattle Children’s to bring together our diverse skills to help solve SIDS.”
“I am hopeful that the power of digital technologies, particularly analytics and cloud computing, will help researchers get closer to the answers they have been seeking for so long, and to save precious little lives.”
Dr Nino Ramirez, Director, Integrative Brain Research Center, Seattle Children’s said,“This partnership will significantly accelerate and augment the cross-disciplinary research we’re doing to understand the possible causes of SIDS”.