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Unbelievable stuffy I keep reading on ventilators. Just unbelievable. If you want to kill people by the thousands, please continue. The good news is no medic

Unbelievable stuffy I keep reading on ventilators. Just unbelievable. If you want to kill people by the thousands, please continue. The good news is no medical professional in their right mind would use one of the hot messes so many are "inventing". Parts from Home Depot? Really? These are life critical systems designed with serious fault tolerance in mind. Home Depot parts, randomly sourced solenoids, valves and fucking Arduino's? Has everyone gone insane? Here, go read the Wikipedia page on ventilators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventilator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventilator Let me highlight a few sections. Like this one: "Because failure may result in death, mechanical ventilation systems are classified as life-critical systems, and precautions must be taken to ensure that they are highly reliable, including their power-supply." "Mechanical ventilators are therefore carefully designed so that no single point of failure can endanger the patient. They may have manual backup mechanisms to enable hand-driven respiration in the absence of power (such as the mechanical ventilator integrated into an anaesthetic machine). They may also have safety valves, which open to atmosphere in the absence of power to act as an anti-suffocation valve for spontaneous breathing of the patient. Some systems are also equipped with compressed-gas tanks, air compressors or backup batteries to provide ventilation in case of power failure or defective gas supplies, and methods to operate or call for help if their mechanisms or software fail." I mean, seriously, read that again right now. If you have zero experience in fault-tolerant design of electronics, mechanics, pneumatic, hydraulic and software systems, please recognize the dangers of the Dunning-Kruger effect and stop. If that wasn't enough, there's this: "In Canada and the United States, respiratory therapists are responsible for tuning these settings, while biomedical technologists are responsible for the maintenance. In the United Kingdom and Europe the management of the patient's interaction with the ventilator is done by critical care nurses." In case the point isn't obvious, what this means is that certified professionals have to operate these devices. They are not going to get anywhere close to a pile of parts from Home Depot and the local auto repair shop. They are trained to operate reasonably standardized equipment and expect form, function and reliability that comes with time-tested, certified and well proven professionally manufactured equipment. Want to build something to help? Maybe figure out how to make hospital beds. My guess is there's far less likelihood of killing people with a frame and a matress than with a pile of Home Depot parts and an Arduino pretending to be a ventilator. Why are these posts even permitted on HN? This is unproductive dangerous quackery. Nobody is going to invent anything useful. Go help existing companies stamp out more units of their designs. I'm sure they can use the help.

hawaiian 7y ago
> The purpose of this paper is to disseminate the conceptual design of the MVM broadly and to solicit feedback from the scientific and medical community to speed the process of review, improvement and possible implementation.
- robomartin 7y ago
  No, the purpose of this paper is to waste everyone's time. Let professionals handle ventilators. Stop thinking this is something a bunch of mavericks are going to Superman into existence with a bunch of parts from Home Depot.
cozzyd 7y ago
I agree that a well-seasoned ventilator design would be much preferable. The question is, can we get that? I'm not involved in this effort (I found out about it through a forwarded email that's being passed around between physicists), but I suspect that nobody involved has the ability to speed up medical device manufacturer's production or supply chain. The point of "parts from Home Depot" is to bypass the likely specialized supply chain that may be difficult or impossible to scale up.
- robomartin 7y ago
  I don't mean this in a disparaging way. I took a look at the list of authors and my first thought was "A bunch of physicists without a clue". There is a massive difference between bolting a bunch of parts together to mass manufacturing a reliable life-critical device to deploy to hospitals. We seriously need to stop with these pointless games and throw resources at real proven designs by real companies with experienced multidisciplinary teams. Seriously, I don't know how else to say it. Let me give you an idea of just how stupid it is for a bunch of guys pulling parts out of Home Depot to decide they are going to make a ventilator for mass manufacturing: Elon Musk decided to make ventilators at SpaceX. I've done work there. I know exactly what capabilities exist at Hawthorne. Let's just say that, compared to Home Depot, it's a universe apart. Did he go off to invent them from scratch? No, they had high level engineering meetings with Medtronic. His opinion is summarized in one comment and one action. First, among other things, he said, "Impressive team". Next, he bought 1,200 ventilators from China and brought them into the US. He also recognized you can't Superman ventilators. Not that simple. Not if you want to keep people alive. Not if you want to get them to market when needed. There are consequences for allowing our industrial base (I include Europe) to erode to such an extent that we depend on China for just about everything. Here's the perfect storm that is going to show us just how stupid our political class has been for the last 50 years. And somehow everyone is angry at Trump. Medtronic can't scale their ventilator manufacturing because the imbeciles going back decades before him were incompetent political actors who only cared about their own careers and political goals rather than the interests and needs of a nation. Now we get to pay for it. Superman does not exist. We might just have to face a reality that will be cruel punishment for our failings. I hope we learn something by the time this is over.

hawaiian 7y ago

> The purpose of this paper is to disseminate the conceptual design of the MVM broadly and to solicit feedback from the scientific and medical community to speed the process of review, improvement and possible implementation.

robomartin 7y ago
No, the purpose of this paper is to waste everyone's time. Let professionals handle ventilators. Stop thinking this is something a bunch of mavericks are going to Superman into existence with a bunch of parts from Home Depot.

cozzyd 7y ago

I agree that a well-seasoned ventilator design would be much preferable. The question is, can we get that? I'm not involved in this effort (I found out about it through a forwarded email that's being passed around between physicists), but I suspect that nobody involved has the ability to speed up medical device manufacturer's production or supply chain. The point of "parts from Home Depot" is to bypass the likely specialized supply chain that may be difficult or impossible to scale up.

robomartin 7y ago
I don't mean this in a disparaging way. I took a look at the list of authors and my first thought was "A bunch of physicists without a clue". There is a massive difference between bolting a bunch of parts together to mass manufacturing a reliable life-critical device to deploy to hospitals. We seriously need to stop with these pointless games and throw resources at real proven designs by real companies with experienced multidisciplinary teams. Seriously, I don't know how else to say it. Let me give you an idea of just how stupid it is for a bunch of guys pulling parts out of Home Depot to decide they are going to make a ventilator for mass manufacturing: Elon Musk decided to make ventilators at SpaceX. I've done work there. I know exactly what capabilities exist at Hawthorne. Let's just say that, compared to Home Depot, it's a universe apart. Did he go off to invent them from scratch? No, they had high level engineering meetings with Medtronic. His opinion is summarized in one comment and one action. First, among other things, he said, "Impressive team". Next, he bought 1,200 ventilators from China and brought them into the US. He also recognized you can't Superman ventilators. Not that simple. Not if you want to keep people alive. Not if you want to get them to market when needed. There are consequences for allowing our industrial base (I include Europe) to erode to such an extent that we depend on China for just about everything. Here's the perfect storm that is going to show us just how stupid our political class has been for the last 50 years. And somehow everyone is angry at Trump. Medtronic can't scale their ventilator manufacturing because the imbeciles going back decades before him were incompetent political actors who only cared about their own careers and political goals rather than the interests and needs of a nation. Now we get to pay for it. Superman does not exist. We might just have to face a reality that will be cruel punishment for our failings. I hope we learn something by the time this is over.