Designing a COVID-19 ventilator for low-income countries

News - 23 April 2020 - Communication

It was just a few weeks back that a team of IDE students and IDE staff joined forces with Project Inspiration at 3ME. Inspired by a nineteen sixties British ventilator due to be exhibited in Leiden’s Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, Project Inspiration’s goal is to develop an easy to manufacture COVID-19 ventilator based on widely available components and production processes. As a largely mechanical device, not dependent on software, it is simple enough to be operated by untrained staff. As such it opens up new opportunities to answer the urgent need for ventilators in low-resource settings like Central America and Sub-Saharan Africa.

The project is making quick progress. Working in close collaboration with the engineering teams, Talitha Brenninkmeyer, Dione Leeger, Martijn van Bodegraven and Jeroen van Dongen have been focusing on the ventilator’s casing and user interaction in a very rapid iterative design process, making deliberate design choices that force pre-determined and safer use. Jos Oberdorf (Product Architecture) and JC Diehl (Design for Local Healthcare Context) coach the team in this COVID-19 Design Pressure Cooker. The next challenge for the team is to transfer the design and production to low-income countries like Niger, Guatemala and Honduras. Want to help make this happen? Please consider a donation via the project’s crowdfunding page.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte visited TU Delft last week and paid attention to the COVID-19 ventilator. Photographer: Nia Palli.