REAKING: Good news everyone. Our little AmboVent just scored high in an animal medical test done by top physician at Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem. Please share the final report and videos with regulators and physicians in your country
👆👆👆Click on the above picture to see the video 👆👆👆
All over the world, engineers are trying to address a current and expected shortfall of critical care ventilators. In a nutshell, if you don’t have enough ventilators, the mortality of COVID-19, which is very high to start
with, doubles. Without ventilators, twice as many people will die.
About an hour ago, a team from Isreal led by Maj. Dr. David Alkaher and supported by many Israeli institutions, including the military, released the complete designs, plans, code, and instructions for AmboVent. Dr. Alkaher gave me a run-through of the machine, the
documentation of the design, and the way they tested it. For the first time, the world now has a freely usable design with enough detail to be buildable that meets published standards for treating COVID-19 patients. The machine has parts and complexity which allow it to be constructed with the tools available in the average makerspace
or by any small manufacturing firm. They have made a video.
The whole world should thank Israel and this team for this. On the same day, Medtronic has released (almost fully now) plans for the Puritan Bennett™ 560 (PB 560), a full-featured ventilator. This device is more complicated to build, but probably offers more features,
and has already been approved by numerous governments. It is perhaps more expensive to make. Time will tell how easy it is for other firms to build. The Medtronic license lasts for a limited time and is limited to this
pandemic; many may see this as problematic. It cannot be the basis, even in part, of a solution that lasts past the pandemic, nor cannot it be the basis of modules to be reused.
Nonetheless, Medtronic has given the world a potentially life-saving gift, however reservedly, and deserves our gratitude. Taken together, these two donations change the landscape. They give a two-pronged approach to solving
the problem. Large firms, governments, and NGOs can set up production lines for the PB 560. I don’t know what the parts will cost. Thousands of small firms and makerspaces can begin making the AmboVent today. The parts
for an AmboVent probably cost about $500. I must now make some disclaimers. This is a fast evolving situation, and I may have gotten some things wrong. Nevertheless, the game has fundamentally changed.
— Robert L. Read, Keeshan Patel, and Nariman Poushin
(The web-published spreadsheet is easier to read
than the screenshot above.)
During this pandemic, everyone is trying to help. Whether temporarily giving up something you love, like going out with friends, or by sewing masks, or by trying to design a ventilator, most everyone is helping. In the USA right now there
is a high demand for mechanical ventilators. The COVID-19 disease causes some fraction of people, perhaps around 2%, to get Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS). This has been accurately called a “very bad lung thing.”
The overall prognosis of ARDS is poor, with mortality rates of approximately 40%.
Make magazine recently called open source efforts to make ventilators “Plan C”. “Plan A” is the government taking over factories.
Apparently that is not going to happen. “Plan B” is industry increasing production; we hope that happens. But the stakes are high. “Plan C” may be required.
In a public GitHub repo, volunteers at Public Invention and
EndCoronaVirus.org have compiled a list of resources and all known open source mechanical ventilator projects. This list is changing every day. Anyone
can suggest an improvement or update by entering an issue.
In order to allow volunteers to understand the state of these projects, we have analyzed each of these projects along seven attributes to provide information, transparency, and guidance. These values are purely our own opinions, and are
not meant to disparage any project. We have focused not on technical cleverness but on the chance that medical professionals would actually have enough confidence in a particular ventilator to deploy these life-critical devices to
patients who need them as a last resort. We have articulated a draft process that we hope is holistic and practical for actually testing and fielding these devices. Each attribute has five defined levels of readiness. The attributes are Openness, Buildability, Functional Testing, Reliability Testing, COVID-19 Suitability, and Clinician Friendliness. The web-published
spreadsheet is easier to read than the screenshot above.