VentCore

Open Source Ventilator

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Inspiration

We are a desktop 3D printer manufacturer as a company, and we decided to use our professional competence with a highly skilled tech team to tackle a hardware issue of breathing ventilators. The lack of access to essential ventilators for health institutions and their patients got us on the way to think about a easy to manufacture and scalable design. We already have the supply channels needed for all the product components and have a great advisory team of anesthesiologists and surgeons for the practical usage of such devices.

What it does

VentCore is an open source ventilator, that uses BVM bag compression in order to pump air to the patients in a controlled way. It has 2 modes of operations VC (Volume Control) and CPAP (Continuous positive airway pressure). It consists of 2 electrical motors that enable a highly precise and controlled BVM compression and It has 2 Pressure sensors and a Flow sensor for the feedback loop within the device and monitoring the state of the device operation.

How we built it

We have a lot of our products (3D printers on stock) that we have repurposed them to print more than 50% of the parts needed for the Ventcore. We halted all our desktop 3D printer assembly and production process and completely focused to finalize this product. We activated our suppliers and business partners for fast prototyping and refining the design of all the parts in order to have the highest production output possible. It took us 5 days for the first draft, and another 5 days to do 10 iterations utilizing the 3D printers from our own production line. Within 5 days we have finalized the whole hardware aspect and all its issues, now we are working in the firmware and software as well as production planning.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we ran into was the torque of pull in order to compress the bag, and the compression consistency, which was tested for 2 weeks and solved. The other issues we ran into were mainly regarding the practical usage of the device but the open source community and our advisors guided us all the way until the final product ready for production.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are mainly proud of the short time our team was able to conceptualize, prototype, test and finalize a relatively complicated device. We have done all this within 3 weeks.

What we learned

We have learned that only the engineering side is not the whole issue when it comes to using such devices, but the simplicity that it enables a medical professional to use was a priority.

What's next for VentCore - Open Source Ventilator

We are already planning the production of this device with our supply partners so we can have it to market as soon as possible and contribute to this situation we found ourselves in as quickly as possible. Our current production capacity is 100/day, and planning to get this to 500/day of VentCore.

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