Lee Techsler, executive editor, Design World
News reports of the COVID-19 virus have given a lot of space to the shortage of respiratory ventilators. The Society of Critical Care Medicine claims at least 950,000 U.S. patients could need ventilators but hospitals only have 160,000.
One response to statistics like these has been a movement among open-source promoters to initiate community-designed ventilators that can be inexpensive and assembled quickly.
There are several of these efforts afoot. Canada has one called the Code Life Ventilator Challenge. Others are being coordinated from hackaday.com and helpfulengineering.org to name just two. Schools that include M.I.T. and the University of Minnesota have groups working on their own lab-built ventilators.
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