Inventors Are Whipping Up Homemade Ventilators to Fend Off a Shortage. Some Doctors Are Wary
Many hospitals, universities and individual inventors are getting even scrappier, using everything from windshield wiper parts to hardware-store supplies to make ventilating devices. But the things that make mechanical ventilators so expensive and difficult to manufacture—their wide range of functions, settings and feedback gauges—are also what makes them effective for critical care, Lyn-Kew says.
“I find it terrifying and concerning because we know if we’re doing that, we’re going to be providing substandard care to people in an attempt to give care,” Lyn-Kew says. “Is it better to give one person good care or two people really bad care?” Dr. Rohith Malya, an assistant professor at the Baylor College of Medicine, sees it differently. He’s been advising an engineering team at Texas’ Rice University, where he is also an adjunct assistant professor of bioengineering, to help them fine-tune a device that automates bag ventilation . The team’s $300 design, which theyto encourage others to duplicate it, is ready for testing on COVID-19 patients once it clears legal review, its designers say.
Desperate times, Malya says, call for desperate measures. “At the point when hospitals are asking people to bring in their home BiPAP machines,” and “the alternative is sure death,” people need to think outside the box, Malya says. Glen Meyerowitz, a biodesign fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, also disagrees that a streamlined design is inherently ineffective. He madeentirely out of parts purchased from Home Depot, eliminating some of a mechanical ventilator’s settings to focus a narrower range of functions likely to be needed during coronavirus care. Doing so, he says, makes it possible to build the machines efficiently and affordably.
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