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This team made a $500 ventilator — but how will it be used?

from Wired

This team made a $500 ventilator — but how will it be used? Wired In the spring, The New Yorker featured "The MacGyvers Taking on the Ventilator Shortage," about an effort initiated not by a doctor or engineer but a blockchain activist. The University of Minnesota created a cheap ventilator called the Coventor; MIT had the MIT Emergency Ventilator; Rice University, the ApolloBVM. NASA created the Vital, and a fitness monitor company got in the game with Fitbit Flow. The price tags varied from $150 for the Coventor to $10,000 for the Fitbit Flow — all significantly less than premium commercially available hospital ventilators, which can run $50,000 apiece. Around the same time, C. Nataraj, a Villanova College of Engineering professor, was hearing from frontline doctors at Philadelphia hospitals fearful of running out of ventilators for Covid-19 patients. Compelled to help, Nataraj put together a volunteer SWAT team of engineering and medical talent to invent the ideal emergency ventilator. READ MORE

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