3D Lung

prusaprinters

<p>Inspiration<br/> To date, more than 2 million cases of coronavirus have been diagnosed worldwide. A big challenge during this outbreak is to organize the healthcare. Preliminary data (from countries with available data) show that around 20-30% of diagnosed COVID-19 cases are hospitalized and around 4% have severe illness. And number of cases surges in the coming days, experts are warning of a serious problem: a lack of ventilators for patients who need them to stay alive. In the US alone, the COVID-19 pandemic may cause ventilator shortages on the order of 300,000-700,000 units (based on CDC Pandemic Response Plans).</p> <p>We recognize the critical need of ventilators as all the existing ventilators in hospitals are used up. We hope that our system may serve as bridge device for respirators and clinicians trained in respiratory therapy of COVID-19 patients.</p> <p>What it does<br/> 3D lung is a simple low-cost emergency ventilator where most of the parts are produced using a 3D printer, and assembled using simple instructions. It is designed as last resort device to provide help to clinicians and respiratory therapists in hospitals with shortages in ventilators.</p> <p>How I built it<br/> Our team utilized existing open source information of ventilators as well as our knowledge in 3D printing, we were able to provide a way to produce a low-cost ventilator that will be accessible to wide variety of people.</p> <p>Challenges I ran into<br/> During this difficult time, one can face many obstacles while trying to provide a simple solution under a short period of time. One of the challenges was to provide a solution to the electrical mechanism; this requires obtaining few parts that cannot be 3D printed directly, and as a result, leads to some delay due to difficulty in shipping worldwide. Another major challenge is validating our design to be used for all patients of all ages, and this can be solved by following the standards and wide range of measurements that are used for ventilators.</p> <p>What's next for 3D Lung<br/> Using our concept, we aim to make ventilators more accessible and at a low-cost. This provides a solution to provides a solution to large scale production of ventilators.</p> <p>This is an ongoing project, follow us at: <a href="https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4294576">https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4294576</a></p>