Sid A.; August 30th, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has placed immense strain on the world’s healthcare systems. In particular, a major fear is that there is not enough ventilators for all the potential patients who might need them. These ventilators help critically ill patients breathe when they can’t do so on their own anymore. Due to this fear, a call went out for individuals to come up with unique ventilator designs that could be easily produced but still have enough functionality to help patients. Initiatives like this fall under the umbrella of “open source”, where individuals contribute to a design that is freely available for use by the rest of the public. In this post, I want to discuss this movement to build open-source ventilators, specifically the pros and cons and how professional engineers can help.
The above are all examples of open-source ventilator challenges and initiatives. FutureScape participated in the Innovate2Ventilate challenge ourselves. You can see our contribution here. So let’s discuss…
The Pros and Cons
These types of challenges have created mixed opinions. On the one hand, many are supportive and think that these will help to solve a real need, or at the very least will provide a step in the right direction. However, there are also many who worry that these types of challenges can be taken too far, to the point where poor or even non-functional designs will start being used. Both opinions have merit. An article by Joshua M. Pearce, entitled “A review of open source ventilators for COVID-19 and future pandemics” sums it up nicely: ” Future work is needed to achieve the potential of this approach “. Open source ventilators incorporate some pretty unique and powerful ideas into their designs. In other words, they exhibit great potential. But it takes more than just potential to make a successful medical device. It will take work on both the technical and regulatory fronts to bring these hobbyist creations into hospitals.
What Professionals can do
The general public has a vast capacity for idea-generation. They can spawn thousands of unique solutions to the problem of creating a low-cost, easy to manufacture ventilator. But they don’t have the expertise, money, or time to take these concepts and create a finished product. That is where professionals can come in. Engineers working in both the medical device field and other ancillary fields (an example might be Dyson) can take these concepts and build them into final products. They can combine their strengths with the strengths of the crowd to obtain fantastic results. So ultimately, I think that these sorts of open source initiatives do far more good than harm.
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