Public Invention has received a $20,000 grant from Protocol Labs to build the VentMon, a tester/monitor for rapidly manufactured pandemic ventilators.
The pandemic demands a simple device that can be plugged into an airway to test a ventilator. In the developing world, many ventilators are broken and need to be repaired; part of the repairing is confirming function. Moreover, over 100 teams worldside are attempting to design, build, and manufacture ventilators. The VentMon is a way to test prototypes.
We also hope it will become a way to monitor ventilators. That is, all ventilators need to sound an alarm when something goes wrong. There is no reason every ventilator should have a different monitoring and alarming system. We propose the VentMon as an open-source solution that can be integrated into open source ventilator designs to server this function. We have been promoting a basic modularization of the problem:
Public Invention, with the help of volunteer Lauria Clarke, has already shipped 5 VentMons to development teams in the US and Canada. Even though faced with a world-wide supply chain shortage of essential parts, we are working to build 20 more. In an exciting development, one team has begun using our open-source plans to build their own VentMon!
(This grant is an addition to the grant Public Invention recently received from the Mozilla Open Source Software Foundation, which, confusingly, was also for $20,000.)