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The 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

The 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 6y ago
I 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 6y ago
  Background: 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 6y ago
    We 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.
    - dogma1138 6y ago
      We know the requirements fairly well, we just need more ventilators not new ones. The ventilators we have aren’t the problem and their cost and design also don’t impact the production capacity that much what impacts it is the fact that most medical manufacturers never had to operate on such scales and those that even come close tend to big the big international players with global manufacturing that is heavily reliant on China. There is a plethora of designs for ventilators of all types from emergency CPAP machines to multi-mode life support for ICU’s. Those designs have already been validated and there is a huge bank of knowledge to support them. All these pump/turbine based respirator not to mention the pneumatic Ambu bag auto-squeezers don’t really bring anything new to the table they just introduce an untested hardware and software. Like seriously half the ventilators that were shown were an ambu bag and actuator and a micro controller attached to some pressure sensor yes it’s a very simple respirator but do we really need 50 university teams coming up with a design variation? And as far as discovering something new the only thing we discovered so far is that people were put on a ventilator and even more so intubation way too early and that has negatively impacted their survival rate which is one of the reasons why the demand for ventilators has dropped.
      - bluGill 6y ago
        None of that contradicted anything I said. Maybe we will learn something tomorrow that means a new ventilator design would work better, but until then like you say, there is no need to design any when the existing designs work.
        6y ago

dogma1138 6y ago

I 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 6y ago
Background: 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 6y ago
  We 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.
  - dogma1138 6y ago
    We know the requirements fairly well, we just need more ventilators not new ones. The ventilators we have aren’t the problem and their cost and design also don’t impact the production capacity that much what impacts it is the fact that most medical manufacturers never had to operate on such scales and those that even come close tend to big the big international players with global manufacturing that is heavily reliant on China. There is a plethora of designs for ventilators of all types from emergency CPAP machines to multi-mode life support for ICU’s. Those designs have already been validated and there is a huge bank of knowledge to support them. All these pump/turbine based respirator not to mention the pneumatic Ambu bag auto-squeezers don’t really bring anything new to the table they just introduce an untested hardware and software. Like seriously half the ventilators that were shown were an ambu bag and actuator and a micro controller attached to some pressure sensor yes it’s a very simple respirator but do we really need 50 university teams coming up with a design variation? And as far as discovering something new the only thing we discovered so far is that people were put on a ventilator and even more so intubation way too early and that has negatively impacted their survival rate which is one of the reasons why the demand for ventilators has dropped.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      None of that contradicted anything I said. Maybe we will learn something tomorrow that means a new ventilator design would work better, but until then like you say, there is no need to design any when the existing designs work.
      - 6y ago