I'm Kevin Galloway I'm a Research Assistant Professor in Mechanical
Engineering at Vanderbilt University. I'm also the Director of Making at the
Wond’ry which is our innovation center on campus. I teach a course called How to
make almost anything and make it matter. I basically started just looking online
seeing what others were doing and maker community. For me, you know, as a mechanical
engineer, I saw like these designs and a lot of them look not complicated but
they needed resources that a lot of people wouldn't have access to like 3D
printers and laser cutters and one of the things that caught my eye was from
the user forums somebody said why not just use a windshield wiper motor as
something that could be a high high torque option that could deliver that
life-saving kind of squeeze of the ambu-bag
and are easily accessible readily available and for me that's when the
light came on and I just started thinking how can I use a windshield
wiper motor to squeeze an ambu-bag
So we have Version 3 we're working on right now and this is incorporating
a lot of the feedback that we've had from our doctors and I want to say this is a –
we've put together a pretty strong team now a very strong team we've
got five doctors or medical center at Vanderbilt and Bob Webster and myself
and a team of graduate students and postdocs that are helping develop
different subsystems of the device.
So right now, we are gonna do some
some basic, minimal kind of protocols we need in place just to do a
validation and sanity check that this is gonna be safe to you to use
This is, I mean, I hope we don't have to use these – we see this as as your
very last option where it's either no ventilator or a, you know, or this as your ventilating option.
So we're ramping up to build a hundred of these
we are working with us and local industrial partners to get parts made
and parts donated. We've got a bunch of parts on order that should be arriving
towards the end of this week so we're in position to be able to start building our
first, like, hundred batch of these pots starting over next week.
My hope is that this will become a recipe that anybody can use in the world.
So even if it's not during a pandemic but you are in a situation
where you need a ventilator and need one soon that this could be a solution that could be deployed
We've been bombarded with emails since the article came out from our
university and some of the other press coverage I've had emails from folks in
the Philippines, Australia, Afghanistan now, so there are people who are seeing
this and see this as you know a solution that they could make so
they are eager to see these design drawings to be able to begin prototyping
and starting to learn how they might be able to use this device.
It's really, it's work like what you're doing right now creating more opportunities
for people to connect with this information I think is super important