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What started as a WhatsApp conversation between three colleagues from the fields of innovation, biomedicine and engineering, is now the Innovative Respiratory Aid (AIRE) forum. It has just been created to find open source, fast and cheap solutions for ventilation in coronavirus patients and already has 230 participants in Spain.
The crisis caused by COVID-19 is saturating the planet's hospitals. Respiratory failure problems are one of the symptoms associated with this virus. For this reason, initiatives are emerging around the world to develop affordable ventilation systems, such as those proposed in the Open Source Ventilator project.
In Spain, at the end of last week, a WhatsApp conversation between three colleagues from the areas of innovation, biomedicine and engineering has ended with the creation of a forum called Innovative Respiratory Aid (AIRE), which, Today, it has 230 participants.
The initial group was made up of Jorge Barrero, general director of the Cotec Foundation, Andreu Climent, CEO and founder of Corify Care – a spin off of the Gregorio Marañón Hospital – and César García, researcher at the Association Discover Object-Oriented Electronics and expert in 3D printing.
According to Barrero, "the idea arises from a citizen need to, in addition to complying with health recommendations, try to explore what we professionals can do, each in our field, to help in this crisis."
“We have focused on the search for cheaper and easier to manufacture alternatives for ventilation of coronavirus patients. Taking into account that these procedures can become a bottleneck in saturated hospital ICUs,” he explains.
Engineers, manufacturers, entrepreneurs and doctors
“Many volunteers have been joining the debate, such as engineers, manufacturers, entrepreneurs and doctors, some of them from the front lines of intensive care units, and we have seen that it makes sense to work on at least three fronts,” he continues.
On the one hand, “we have proposed studying how we can help industries improve their production capacity. The second option is the reuse of other equipment that could be applied with small tweaks – such as the devices used by people who have sleep apnea. And the third, and most radical, is to design a new device that can complement the most sophisticated technologies.”
These new, simpler respirators “could be used in less serious patients and thus more complex equipment can be freed up for people who are worse off,” he emphasizes. The plan is to offer 'open source' plans for devices that can be manufactured quickly and in a distributed manner using techniques such as 3D printing for some of the components.
