Challenging COVID-19 with Creativity: Supporting Design Space Exploration for Emergency Ventilators

Abstract

The high concentration and rapid increase in lung diseases caused by COVID-19 has suddenly led medical staff to face a lack of ventilators in emergency situations. In this context, many enthusiasts and/or designers all over the world have started to think about low cost and open-source solutions for emergency ventilators, with the aim of providing concrete aid. In a small amount of time, many different solutions have been proposed, most of which are based on the automatic compression of the auxiliary manual breathing unit (AMBU) bag. In particular, many different designs have been conceived for the AMBU compression mechanism, which contains the most critical parts to be designed. Here arises the aim of this work, i.e., to propose a methodological approach to support the creativity of designers involved in inventing increasingly sustainable and reliable low-cost compression mechanisms for AMBU-based ventilators. Accordingly, a conceptual framework is proposed, capable of collecting existing ideas and organizing the underpinning concepts, to provide stimuli for new idea generation and to keep track of (and possibly to share) the explored design space. Illustrative examples are provided in order to show how the proposal can be used in practice. In particular, a set of currently available solutions is schematically shown through the proposed graphical tools, and the generation of new illustrative solutions is presented. Additionally, it is shown how to represent further ideas (e.g., those coming from other teams) in the framework.

Maximizing design potential: investigating the effects of utilizing opportunistic and restrictive design for additive manufacturing in rapid response solutions

“…Therefore, a direction for future research is to study the evolution of ideas over time in terms of their DfAM utilization and the subsequent effects on creativity and manufacturing efficiency. Such an investigation could also be extended toward the development of manufacturing feedback tools to cue designers to use DfAM techniques that have not received sufficient attention in future research (Fiorineschi et al, 2020b). Finally, from our findings, we see the need to account for opportunistic DfAM utilization when assessing designs and making design evaluations in DfAM tasks.…”

Novel additive manufacturing applications for communicable disease prevention and control: focus on recent COVID-19 pandemic

“…However, the available stock for these devices to compensate for the necessities of the pandemic of COVID-19 was not possible. For example, the UK has announced that they had 10.000 contemporary and 8.000 old fashioned mechanical ventilators, while the required number was estimated to be 30.000 [56]. Hence, most of the companies around the world focused on the fast production of these contemporary devices.…”

Detección de peatones en el día y en la noche usando YOLO-v5

“…Las previsiones por posible carencia de equipos para asistencia respiratoria motivaron a los investigadores a proponer sistemas alternativos de ventilación mecánica [4,5] a partir de las unidades de respiración manual auxiliar AMBU (del acrónimo en inglés Auxiliary manual breathing unit) [6,7]. Con esta iniciativa se buscó la colaboración entre el Centro de Innovación en Diseño Industrial y Manufactura (CIDIM) y el Instituto de Investigación e Innovación en Electrónica (IIIE), con la gestión de recursos especiales del Instituto de Investigación en Energía (IIE) y el apoyo de la cooperación de la Embajada de Estados Unidos en El Salvador.…”