CoVent-19 Challenge Asks Designers and Engineers to Respond to the Ventilator Crisis
This global, open innovation initiative is via Stratasys GrabCAD platform and designed to help develop a rapidly deployable mechanical ventilator.
A dozen Boston area anesthesiology residents have launched an eight-week hackathon hosted on GrabCAD.com to design a rapidly deployable, minimum viable mechanical ventilator for patients with COVID-19-related ventilator-dependent lung injury. The CoVent-19 Challenge is open to teams and individuals anywhere, and finalists will work directly with Stratasys 3D printing experts and the CoVent-19 Challenge team to turn their designs into prototypes for testing.
Current sponsors include Stratasys, Ximedica, Valispace, HackFund, and Yelling Mule. Stratasys is providing the top three winners with a total of $10,000 in credits they can use for 3D-printed parts from Stratasys Direct Manufacturing.
According to one Chinese medical device maker, the demand for ventilators due to COVID-19 is at least 10 times what’s available in hospitals around the world. In Italy, doctors are being forced to triage patients due to a severe ventilator shortage. In the U.S., current ventilation capacity is about 170,000 patients, while some projections show nearly one million patients may need mechanical ventilation.
The challenge will run on Stratasys’ GrabCAD Challenge site beginning April 1. This site reaches a community of more than 7 million professional designers, engineers, manufacturers, and students, and anyone can participate. The general entry round, focused on initial designs, will run for four weeks, with a panel of judges, including Stratasys Founder and Chief Innovation Officer Scott Crump, selecting up to 20 finalists. Evaluation by judges of minimum-viable ventilator designs will assess safety, reliability, and manufacturability, while minimizing cost and complex software and electronics.
Finalist teams will work with medical and technical experts through a four-week invitation-only round to develop and test functional prototypes. Stratasys application engineers will provide 3D printing consulting and services to the finalists.
The CoVent-19 Challenge team is working with private and public sector partners to be able to expedite U.S. government approval of a winning design. The team has secured experts in regulatory measures and safety testing to ensure all products meet U.S. and international standards.
“As anesthesiologists at Massachusetts General Hospital, we are experts at using ventilators to care for critically ill patients, so it was natural for us to feel an immediate calling to do something about the ventilator shortage,” said Dr. Richard Boyer, founder and director of the CoVent-19 Challenge. “We’ve been watching as countries around the world struggle with providing invasive mechanical ventilation to all who need it. Despite the important efforts by ventilator manufacturers to ramp up their own production, there’s a need for a solution particularly for areas where standard mechanical ventilators may be hard to obtain.”
Earlier, Stratasys announced it has received requests for 350,000 face shields. Any 3D printing shop that wishes to help print at least 100 visors can fill out an online form to be invited to join the effort.
The CoVent-19 Challenge provides millions of engineers and designers an opportunity to help with the ventilator crisis.
