from Hacker News

Open Source Ventilator Project

by cklaus on 3/20/20, 6:29 PM with 141 comments

  • by cklaus on 3/20/20, 6:29 PM

    Welcome to Open Source Ventilator (OSV) Ireland. This project was initiated by the COVID-19 global pandemic as a result of a community discussion within a Facebook group called Open Source COVID-19 Medical Supplies (OSCMS). This group rapidly grew and currently is targeting the development of a number of different COVID-19 related medical supplies.

    OSV Ireland was formed by Colin Keogh, Conall Laverty & David Pollard, with the goal of building a focused team in Ireland to begin development of a Field Emergency Ventilator (FEV) in partnership with the Irish Health Service. To date we have formed a team of engineers, designers and medical practitioners to develop new, low resource interventions, all working collaboratively online. Bag Valve Masks (BVM), 3D printed and traditionally manufactured components are being considered to maximise potential manufacturing capabilities. We will also include other challenges and problems as they arise from frontline healthcare workers, which we will encourage our volunteers to tackle.

    We have a core developer team publishing open source designs with ongoing communication with medical professionals regarding needs requirements, testing and validation processes. The developer team is led by OpenLung in Canada in collaboration with an Irish based engineering and operations team. The developer team is led by Trevor Smale, Dr. Andrew Finkle, and David O’Reilly from OpenLung as well as Conall Laverty and Dr. Keith Kennedy from Ireland. Work is well underway with hundreds of worldwide contributors.

  • by vr46 on 3/20/20, 7:24 PM

    What is the point of all these? Large scale manufacturers have already been sent blueprints of ventilators and have the engineering ability and production lines to make them. Then you need trained nurses and staff to operate them.

  • by DoreenMichele on 3/20/20, 7:43 PM

    I made some remarks about ventilator alternatives here:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22624959

    To pull out some pertinent details:

    Ventilators for covid19 seem to be mostly for inflammation and fluid in the lungs (aka pneumonia), not lung or chest paralysis.

    If you need a ventilator due to inflammation or fluid build up, you can do other things to address those issues.

    If you are doing home care for serious lung issues, a downside of mechanical intervention is that you probably don't know how to adequately sterilize your equipment. This means nasty stuff grows on the equipment and then this nasty stuff gets delivered directly into the lungs.

    So I'm not thrilled to pieces to see the emphasis on "ooh, shiny!" homemade technical solutions in place of non-invasive home care.

    You can do lung clearance without mechanical intervention. This can make a ventilator unnecessary.

    You can do lung clearance easily on your own in the shower by standing with your feet shoulder-width apart or a bit wider, bending over as far as you can and coughing hard.

    If you bring up a lot of fluid from the lungs, it looks and feels a whole lot like vomiting. My sons and I call it "puking up a lung."

    Inflammation can be combated with commonly available non drug remedies, like caffeine, lettuce, avoiding pro inflammatory foods (avoid peanut oil like the devil himself made it for you, limit or avoid bacon as it is hard on the lungs).

    Etc.

    Please see my previous remarks about best sleeping positions, etc.

    I am very concerned that homemade ventilators are going to become a source of secondary infection and this secondary infection will be worse than covid19 because it will be bacterial or fungal and it will be antibiotic resistant.

    If I had any idea how on Earth to start a counter movement, I would be all over it. I have no idea how to do that, so I occasionally leave a comment on HN giving some of my thoughts, which isn't likely to exactly catch fire. This is today's comment in that vein.

  • by davidw on 3/20/20, 7:16 PM

    Anyone pitching in seems like they're doing a good thing, but isn't the problem one more of political organization and scaling production?

    In other words, the US president (he is the only one authorized to do it) needs to activate the Defense Production Act, and get existing companies to mass produce existing designs. Something similar needs to happen elsewhere. This is a matter of days or weeks, not months.

    Please gently correct me if I have this wrong.

  • by thekalinga on 4/2/20, 3:47 AM

    Went over many comments. I see many people who are worried about an opensource project because its going to throw the apple cart of existing price gouging players in the market, but they are not open about it

    This is an excellent foray of opensource into a space thats currently extorting people to live, i.e medical industry

  • by chrisseaton on 3/20/20, 6:59 PM

    > 15-20% of infected people require hospitalization for respiratory problems

    This is wrong - it's 15-20% of identified, diagnosed and subsequently monitored infected people, isn't it?

    I thought there was a mass of unidentified infected people, and even basically diagnosed but told to just deal with it at home with no further contact as they're low risk and minimal symptoms, and (obviously) 0% of these groups are going into hospital? This is what Wikipedia says at the moment.

    Or am I wrong?

  • by arcticbull on 3/20/20, 7:22 PM

    Please, stop with these. As experts have shared many times on here, once you need a ventilator, the ventilator is the least of your problems. Trying to apply a ventilator to a COVID-19 patient who needs one when you have no idea what you're doing can create the same lung injuries as COVID-19 itself.

  • by brutus1213 on 3/20/20, 11:29 PM

    I like the effort and project. I tried looking at it and the techcrunch articles and was disappointed by this and the open source mask efforts. This is going to sound horrible but I think there is something that needs to be said. We shouldn't have to hack/make our way out of this shortage. I say this as a diehard hacker/maker. A factory can put together high quality and high volume versions of these two items. It is a national shame (I'm in Canada but lived in the US for years) that we don't have domestic capacity and ability to surge on these items. We can still surge. This is not bloody rocket science. If we start today, we can have factories in a month. We should be surging on this today. We should have been surging on this since January and not have to deal with a shortage of bloody test swabs. I know raw materials and equipment are in short supply. But if our economies are truly unable to find the necessary parts in our just-in-time inventory or storage, we as a generation should hold our heads in shame and leaders accountable.

  • by dang on 3/20/20, 8:12 PM

  • by TaylorAlexander on 3/20/20, 7:12 PM

    The page isn’t loading so I’m not sure what they’ve got, but I’m still trying to get answers to a question I have. I did research Tuesday and it seems like ventilators are positive pressure only, and they cycle between a low pressure and a high pressure. If this is the case, could an air compressor with a regulator be used as the pressure source? If so, a small device with just two pressure regulators and an electronic valve could be used to cycle between high and low pressures for each patient. I keep seeing open source ventilators that use a fan and a motor, but those seem likely to fail. Air compressors are abundant and could literally be taken from construction sites to be used. You put a pressure regulator to go down to the (very low) pressures one might want as a maximum for any patient, then you can gang that up to a whole bunch of hoses. Finally a little box with a couple of regulators can adjust the per patient high and low levels.

    This to me seems much simpler and more reliable than ventilators with their own fan. But I don’t have a good way of reaching anyone. I’ve created a thread on my website with my sources, thinking, and some questions. If anyone knows about this please reply here or there and let me know. Thanks.

    https://reboot.love/t/coronavirus-towards-a-cheap-and-easy-t...

  • by mikeInAlaska on 3/20/20, 10:52 PM

    Has anyone looked at Cuirass ventilators? The (seemingly only) manufacturer says they are great for clearing lungs and breathing. They even seem to indicate them for use with Covid. They are basically iron lungs revamped. They look easier to amateur build than invasive ventilators and with no intubation, anyone could apply one.

  • by classics2 on 3/20/20, 10:40 PM

    Sure, have some home made barotrauma and pneumonia to go with your COVID.

  • by charliewallace on 3/21/20, 2:47 AM

    This is a project based in Ireland. For a similar US-based project, see https://www.projectopenair.org/

  • by Gatsky on 3/20/20, 10:55 PM

    I am 90% sure there will be a useful antiviral therapy available soon, whether it is remdesivir, favipiravir or even chloroquine. This will change the game in humanity's favour. Antivirals are also the only solution which can actually scale to the problem, unlike these ventilator projects or even vaccines (at least not for a very long time, bear in mind that under ideal conditions the supply of seasonal flu vaccines is often dicey). The first use for antivirals will be to reduce the number of patients with severe infection requiring ventilatory support.

    Making these antivirals as useful as possible is of great importance, and that means going all in on mass producing a quick and reliable and broadly applicable diagnostic test.

    I would much rather see open source projects targeting diagnostic tests or manufacturing nasopharyngeal swabs. Admittedly, this is much harder to achieve for people not involved in life science research or without access to virological specimens.

  • by aceperry on 3/20/20, 7:13 PM

    There are a few other open-source and crowd-source projects like this that I've seen. It's interesting to see so much volunteer response to the crisis.