Public Invention was recently featured in an article in Make: magazine that highlights our ventilator project in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The article includes a video interview with President Robert L. Read and Public Invention collaborators Geoff Mulligan, Lauria Clarke, Juan E. Villacres Perez, and Avinash Baskaran, detailing our research and exploring the future possibilities of the project. With many states and nations’ COVID-19 cases now skyrocketing, our project is as important as ever.
Our research includes a call for modular assembly designs to allow for distributed manufacturing, and presents our own proposal—called VentMon—for testing and monitoring ventilator systems. VentMon’s goal is to build a test/monitoring fixture to assist ventilator building teams in order to create the most effective ventilator. We have compiled a list of and systematically scored over 80 existing open source ventilator projects in hopes of accomplishing this goal.
With this list of open source projects, we hope to provide helpful feedback for ventilator designers and future builders. In alignment with Public Invention’s mission, we advocate for the benefit and usefulness of open source projects, so that the “typical Make: magazine reader” can collaborate and get involved. In the video interview, we emphasize the idea that with a project’s information and progress public, it is inevitably more trustworthy; creators anywhere can analyze whether a product functions effectively, and can build on this knowledge to create a reliable project that really works—and in this case, could save lives.
To read the article and watch to the full interview, click here.
