One of the very interesting things about our response to covid19 has been to watch who responded, who felt both the need and the capability to help. Now, I don’t want to discount the admirable efforts of the formal healthcare system and its many practitioners, but I want to focus here on people that changed what they were doing and attempted to expand the capability of our society to respond to this pandemic. Seeing Dave Franchino’s post on open hardware design this past week, I’d like to express a few observations, to enumerate some of the breakdowns I saw and preview how my company Mechanomy is working to fix these issues for the next supply chain emergency.
Mid-March, I gave some thought to the improvised/open ventilator efforts and covid, looking to see if I and Mechanomy could help in a way that wasn’t nakedly marketing. I was quickly dissuaded by the disparity between the predictions of impending tragedy in mass media, necessitating significant action, and the lack of any formal engagement from healthcare providers and manufacturers. Locally, I saw a job posting as GE Healthcare stood up 2nd and 3rd shifts, but they were not seeking engineers or really attempting to change their product or design around supply chain shortfalls. Likewise there were no anesthesiologists or other practitioners explaining to the broader world what a ventilator needed to do, what features they can do without, and how they would vet or come to trust non-name-brand solutions. Continue reading “Open Ventilator Design and Production”