US Company Shares Its Ventilator Design For Free to Fight COVID-19

Car manufacturers in India like Maruti, Mahindra & Hyundai have developed their own prototypes of ventilators.

This portable ventilator has been designed by Medtronic in the US.

(Photo: Techrunch)

There is a desperate need for ventilators at hospitals around the world and MedTech startups and even the manufacturing industry is chipping in with prototypes of ventilators that can be used in these dire situations.

American healthcare and biomedical engineering company Medtronic was in the news recently as Tesla CEO Elon Musk had discussed with the company about a possible collaboration in building ventilator hardware to address the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to a report in Techcrunch, Medtronic has taken things further from that discussion and decided to make the design plans for its in-house ventilator freely available for anyone to use.

It’s giving the full design specifications. product manual, documents for its Puritan Bennett (PB) 560 portable ventilator hardware.

Any startups, MedTech organisation or corporates that want access to the design plans of the PG 560 ventilator to build their own prototypes can register here to get access to the files and agree to the license.

The PB 560 has a number of advantages due to its portability as it can be easily moved around and caters to different kinds of working environments. The design was originally introduced back in 2010 so it’s been tested and has the reputation of treating patients for all those years.

There are plenty of efforts underway to make portable and cost-effective ventilators in this hour of need. In India, car manufacturing companies like Mahindra & Mahindra, Hyundai, and Maruti Suzuki have come up with their own prototypes of ventilators.

There is still a lot of demand for this specific medical equipment and many other tech startups, corporates and MedTech organisations are in the process of coming up with their own ventilator designs. This move by Medtronic could help the process of making a ventilator a bit easier now.

The challenges that companies will face now is reorganising their assembly lineup in order to cater to this design and specifications. But Medtronic has said that it is willing to lend the expertise and resources that are necessary to build this ventilator.

It also says the design is well-suited for “investors, startups, and academic institutions” who are looking to speed up production and create their own adapted designs.

This will help manufacturers to build at a scale that will be relatively faster and also something that caters to the needs of the hospitals.

Medtronic also manufactures other types of ventilators, but since there have more components and complex designs, the PB 560 to some extent is relatively smaller and the simplified design makes it the ideal choice in this situation.