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All these designs are cool projects but other than being a distraction and some PR nothing will come out of them. There are plenty of proven designs that can b
by dogma1138 7y ago
All these designs are cool projects but other than being a distraction and some PR nothing will come out of them.
There are plenty of proven designs that can be manufactured cheaply, the price of the end units especially for things like ventilators isn't often due to complexity and manufacturing costs but due to the costs of maintaining a supply chain, manufacturing and providing support (including liability) for the healthcare market.
None of these things seem to solve these issues other than potentially removing liability to who ever decides to manufacture those units.
Any thing can be built with off the shelf parts but the reason why most medical devices aren't it's because you need to take special care in your supply chain.
Ventilators use valves that aren't that different and often the same valves that are available for a plethora of other applications like industry and agriculture but the fact that it's the same valve doesn't mean that it's the same supply chain.
The suppliers for medical equipment make sure that say the lubricants that are used are safe and that no one can say replace o-ring used in the valve from one supplier to another without recertifying the entire thing making sure that the new o-ring meets the exact same specs.
For things like electronics then you have a whole other world of safety from things like resistance to liquids (anything from blood splatter to leaking IV bags), EMI to make sure it won't interfere with any other devices or be susceptible to interference on it's own and ESD to make sure there could no chance of sparks especially in devices that pure or high concentration oxygen can flow through or devices that will be near oxygen feeds.
And heck even if all that isn't the reason for ventilators being expensive and the true reason is IP Licensing/Patents then the US government and every other government can easily either compensate the IP holders directly or simply withdraw protection on the IP in question.
Many countries have already had legislation in place to allow governments to suspend IP protection or grant protection to violators during an emergency.
- sremani 7y agoThe effort towards the design of ventilators likely would have started when there was peak anticipated demand. The NY Governor was asking for 40,000 ventilators last month. So, we should not dismiss the effort. There will be lots of wasted effort during the sprint to plug things in a hurry. But it may not be really wasted effort, given that projects like these can be fountainheads to unknown future innovations or relations.
- dogma1138 7y agoI don't understand why there needs to be a design effort. Other countries simply took existing designs for ventilators and shifted manufacturing capacity e.g.: https://www.timesofisrael.com/iai-defense-ministry-inovytec-convert-missile-factory-to-produce-ventilators/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/iai-defense-ministry-inovytec-... So overall I don't see why the "design" was ever the bottleneck.
- iancmceachern 7y agoBackground: I design medical devices like this for a living and have for nearly 20 years. I also want to applaud the efforts of everyone working to leverage their professional experience toward helping us all through this. I agree with this comment 100%. What the world needs now is more of the ventilators we already have designed, not new designs. With any new medical device comes a bunch of teething pains, finding and fixing bugs in the hardware and software design, training, testing andd iterative improvement of all these things as new issues are identified. All of this requires significant clinical support and companies that do this stuff typically employ dozens of clinically trained folks to aid in the introduction and development of the clinical aspect of the device. All of this time and effort is just not available now, any and all clinical resources need to be focused on treating patients, not helping engineers find bugs in their systems. I believe this because an alternative exists, we do not need to reinvent the wheel, we just need more of the wheels we've already invented. To be clear, I do however believe there is a lot of value in investing heavily and exploring all potential novel treatments and devices that could help fight this. I just don't see a value add to designing new respirators vs. Just making more of the designs we have now. I could be wrong, there could be significant manufacturing or other clinical advantages which i am not aware of.
- bluGill 7y agoWe might need new ventilators, but we don't know what the requirements are until then our existing designs are better than anything new : we know they work and can be made. All we need is to scale production and that is much easier. As we learn more we might discover things that make the current ventilators not optimal at which point it is worthwhile to design something new.