- [Narrator] Ventilators have emerged
as a crucial weapon in hospital coronavirus treatment.
They move air in and out of the lungs
for critically ill patients whose infections
have made it impossible to breathe on their own.
But hospitals around the world are struggling
with ventilator shortages,
and manufacturing efforts
aren't moving fast enough to meet the rising need.
This has spurred a number of engineers,
universities, and medical professionals into action.
For several weeks, they've been gathering
in Facebook groups, Slack channels, and websites
to share expertise, ideas, and designs
for homemade ventilators.
- And then it goes into one of these valves here
which controls inflating these bags at the back.
- [Narrator] But will any of these open source plans
ever turn into real ventilators
that actually help save lives?
MIT recently launched this website
to resurface a 10-year old project
to automate a hand-pumped ventilator
also known as a manual resuscitator.
In 2010, they published a paper
detailing their design and testing.
Now, a group of engineers
and medical professionals in Colombia
are using MIT's plans in an effort
to mass produce emergency ventilators in Medellin.
- The idea is try to get some machines together
that they can make at a cost of about
a thousand, $1300, something like that.
And this is a machine that's actually far simpler
than the machines that you might find, say,
in a hospital right now in Bogota or New York
or in Mexico City,
'coz they can cost, 30, 35,000, 45,000 dollars.
These are definitely, sort of, emergency machines.
- [Narrator] The current unprecedented global demand
has made importing ventilators or even their parts
difficult everywhere, and virtually impossible
in developing countries like Colombia.
INNSPIRAMED has partnered with a number
of domestic automotive and homoplants manufacturers
to build locally.
They're also working with Colombia's version
of the FDA, called Invima,
to make sure their devices meet all
of the country's federal safety standards.
- They're having discussions with them,
they're having to turn in paperwork
and get approval for the next step,
to test these prototypes on human beings.
And if that works well,
then they will be getting the approval
to produce these in the factories in Medellin.
- INNSPIRAMED hopes Invima approval moves quickly enough
to have 1500 machines manufactured and operating
in hospitals by May,
when epidemiologists predict Colombia will hit the peak
of coronavirus infections.
In other parts of the world
another group of medical professionals, academics
and engineers recently published
a different proof-of-concept
for an emergency ventilator that can be built without
the help of local manufacturers or factories.
- We sit with the doctors in the beginning and we say,
"Okay, give us the medical minimum
"that a ventilator needs to achieve."
And we'll strip down
and try to design a machine that was so simple
that you can build it everywhere in the world.
This is a last-resort machine.
- [Narrator] Unregulated and more widely available materials
mean an even more accessible ventilator,
but there are risks
that come with using parts like construction materials
in a medical setting.
Regulations for medical equipment are much more stringent
than for commercial hardware.
- Just the level of testing,
the level of reliability, redundancy
duration of use, the duty cycle,
and how long things are expected to perform,
they're different for different settings.
- [Narrator] Dr Pankaj Merchia worries
that some of these open source ventilator systems
could fail in practice,
even after successful tests with the prototype.
- What you're turning on and off,
your gardening sprinklers or your lawn sprinkler
once a week,
they just aren't designed to do this 20,000 times a day
without missing a breath.
- [Narrator] Dr Merchia is working on developing adaptors
to repurpose CPAP machines as ventilators.
CPAP machines, which are much less expensive
and more common than ventilators,
help patients with sleep apnoea maintain
a steady breathing pattern throughout the night.
- [Pankaj] There're about 60 million Americans
who have sleep apnoea,
and there's over a million of these machines currently
in the United States.
- We're converting the BiPAP machines.
- [Narrator] New York governor, Andrew Cuomo,
recently announced state department health approval
and plans to convert BiPAP machines,
which are similar to CPAPs, into ventilators.
And while this kind of solution makes sense
for places like the US,
it doesn't help solve shortage problems
in areas lacking these sleep aid devices.
- If you have nothing available
and you're in a battlefield
and someone gets shot by a bullet,
instead of using a pre-formed tourniquet,
if you take off your own belt to prevent them
from bleeding out and dying,
that's okay, because you had nothing better available.
So, depending upon what's available to you
in the healthcare system
where you're located,
available in that it's there now, when you need it,
you have to make the best choice available.
(gurgling water)