By: Braden Kelley / Sarah Stone
Calling all doctors, nurses, designers, engineers and designers: join one of the amazing Open Source Ventilator Projects to contribute your passion, creativity, time and expertise to help develop low-cost ventilators to fight the Coronavirus (COVID-19).
Note: We will continue to update this post as challenges and resources are shared with us – please email editorialdesk@innovationmanagement.se if you have a resource you would like to share.
Ennomotive Challenge
Ennomotive has launched non-profit online competition for the ideation of low-cost, easy-to build solutions. The goal is to speed up the availability of ventilators in hospitals everywhere to help patients with coronavirus.
The number of people affected by the pandemic doubles every three days in many countries. Since 20% of patients are hospitalized and 5% needs to be admitted in an ICU, the demand for ventilators is sky-high.
Ennomotive has joined other international initiatives for the development of easy-to-build ventilators and makes its global community of 20,000 engineers available to face the challenge.
Based on its experience, ennomotive has chosen to focus on solutions that can adapt or reuse widely used standard industrial components or that use other easy-to-access and universal everyday-life elements.
This online challenge is open worldwide to any engineering professional, company, tech center, maker or scholar from different industries and technical backgrounds that want to propose a solution for this challenge. The final goal is to make a key contribution to the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.
The solutions resulting from this challenge will be open to the public and ennomotive will fund the development of the best prototypes in the next round. Given the urgency, the first deadline for submissions is the 25th of March.
CoVent-19 Challenge, by Massachusetts General Hospital
The COVID-19 pandemic is upon us, ignoring all borders or nationality. Globally, the resources required to provide safe and necessary medical care are critically limited. The severely limited number of mechanical ventilators is now dictating the number of patients that can receive life-saving respiratory support in densely infected areas. Physicians around the world are being forced to make the impossible decision–who may continue to fight COVID-19 and who will not.
Most countries have yet to see the full devastation of COVID-19. Valiant efforts to flatten the curve of the pandemic through social distancing and personal hygiene will curb the exponential rise in new cases. However, the number of infected individuals is still projected to outnumber the current worldwide supply of mechanical ventilators. Starting today, we must explore and implement strategies to rapidly augment our mechanical ventilation capabilities. We are calling on you, our global community, for a life-saving creative solution.
The CoVent-19 Challenge is a non-profit initiative started by Anesthesia Resident Physicians from Massachusetts General Hospital. We are hosting an open virtual moonshot competition to rapidly develop and deploy a solution to augment our mechanical ventilation capabilities. While we continue our clinical duties, we plan to kickoff this worldwide collaboration next week.
We are pursuing a creative solution to expand our current mechanical ventilation capabilities, deployable within the next 60-90 days, before the projected peak of the pandemic. The CoVent-19 team is seeking engineers, innovators, designers, and makers to turn this into a reality. We are putting forth this challenge to form a collaborative alliance in an open minds/open access manner, to rapidly develop a solution together. We are continuing to recruit resources, as well as experts for an advisory panel, to guide participants through their creative processes as our effort grows.
Whether for a loved one or for the collective survival of our neighbors, help us support those devastated by respiratory failure from COVID-19. Join us in this push to survive the peak!
Additional Challenges
Here are some ways of getting involved and some inspiration and some cheaper ventilator options:
- Ultimate Medical Hackathon
- Open Source COVID19 Medical Supplies group on Facebook
- DIY Pandemic Ventilator (built during Avian Flu crisis and shared on Instructables)
- Story on OneBreath winning PopSci Innovation Award in 2010
- OneBreath company web site ($4,000 low cost respirator vs. $35,000 traditional solution)
Below is a video from the Lemelson Foundation from 2015 that shares the story of how Matt Callaghan came to start OneBreath Ventilators to create lower cost ventilators for developing countries and the rest of the world after H1N1 Swine Flu never became a problem in the USA thanks to President Obama’s administration proactive steps to protect our country. (Learn more about the design process by reading this Stanford Byers Center for BioDesign article).
If you know of other efforts working on creating low cost, quick to produce ventilators, please post as a comment here!
Originally published at BradenKelley.com – Innovation, Change and Digital Transformation
About the author
Braden Kelley is an experienced innovation speaker, trainer, and organizational change specialist. He is the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire and has been advising companies on how to increase their revenue and cut their costs since 1996. Braden writes frequently on the topics of continuous innovation and change, and works with clients to create innovative strategies, effective content marketing, organizational change, and improved organizational performance. He has maximized profits for companies while living and working in England, Germany, and the United States. Braden earned his MBA from top-rated London Business School. He is the creator of the Change Planning ToolkitTM and the new book Charting Change, designed to make change less overwhelming, more human and to help get everyone literally all on the same page for change. And in his spare time, Braden is a co-founder of the popular global innovation community – InnovationExcellence.com – home to 7,500+ innovation articles and an innovation leader on Twitter (@innovate) with 17,000+ hard-earned followers.