Hi all. I'm an emergency doctor that has been working on the frontlines for three years now. The recent coronavirus outbreak has me thinking about what would happen if medical ventilators come in short supply. The usual demand for such a machine is quite low but could ramp up dramatically in the next few months.
I'm also interested in tech and I've been reading in the last few days about supply chains grinding to a halt for tech companies. I'm also very aware of the usual regulatory restrictions in the designing,manufacturing and marketing of medical apparatuses which means it would be probably quite hard for medical suppliers to produce a significantly larger amount of machines on short order.
So we are in a potential situation of demand rising sharply and supply not being able to be raised accordingly.
Would it be possible, baring regulatory concerns
On the hardware side, I'm thinking about something that would use readily available non medical grade mechanical components as much as possible and 3d printing for custom hardware.On the software and electronics side, I'm thinking that the ideal design would use readily available tools such as single board computers used by the diy community and interface through standard protocols such as usb or bluetooth with non medical grade computers such as the readily available smartphones we (and patients) carry in our pockets.
Could this be open/crowd sourced ? I Know it might sound crazy, but in the ER you have to learn to deal with whatever comes up in often the most creative of ways
Thank you for your time. Feel free to share this post on any relevant subreddit. Sorry if this post does not follow your community rules. English is not my first language.
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