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Professional Ventilator Design Open Sourced Today By Medtronic
Medical device company Medtronic released designs for one of their ventilators to open source for use in the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a laudable action, and there is plenty to glean from the specs (notable is that the planned release is incomplete as of this writing, so more info is on the way). Some initial reactions: medical devices are complicated, requirements specifications are enormous, the bill of materials (BOM) is gigantic, and component sourcing, supply chain, assembly, and testing are just as vital as the design itself.
The pessimist in me says that this design was open sourced for two reasons; to capitalize on an opportunity to get some good press, and to flex in front of the DIY community and convince them that the big boys should be the ones solving the ventilator shortage. The likelihood of anyone actually taking these specs and building it as designed are essentially zero for a variety of reasons, but let's assume their intent is to give a good starting point for newer changes. The optimist in me says that after what happened to California over the weekend with 170 ventilators arriving broken, it might be nice to have open designs to aid in repair of existing non-functioning ventilators.
The design details released today are for their PB560 model, which was originally launched in 2010 by a company called Covidien, before it merged with Medtronic, so we're already starting with a device design that's a decade old. But it's also a design that has proven itself through widespread use, and this data dump gives us a great look at what actually goes into one of these machines.
As one might suspect with a medical device, there are documents. Lots of documents! Among those supplied are: "Requirements Documents", "Electrical Schematics", and "Manufacturing Documents" and far more still remain:
Despite it being a dump of 53MB, there's quite a bit missing if you were trying to build this machine. However, Medtronic did mention in their press release that "...software code and other information will follow shortly." so there are more details on the way.
[...] we suspect that the amount of work that would be required to spin up assembly of this particular product is more than could be accomplished in the amount of time available, and the resources that would have to be mobilized are probably the same resources already working on building medical devices for other designs. The documentation around the release says any products released based on this are only to be used for COVID-19, so if anyone does manage to take this and use it to start production in a timely manner it will be both incredibly helpful, and super impressive.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 31 2020, @05:18PM (2 children)
So, thinking logically through the criticism, there aren't BOMs or specific part numbers released which could (likely would) cause an even harder run on the very parts which are already in too short supply for the Medtronic / Tesla production lines to build the vents to spec. Just like the people overbuying food and toilet paper (depending on your particular local insecurities), possibly well intentioned actors would make an already short supply of critical components even shorter by buying more than they can effectively use to get safe/effective ventilators out there when and where they are needed.
I agree, the specs shown in the video aren't a cookbook of how to make the things, but for somebody with an attention span slightly longer than a fruit fly, they do provide tremendously valuable information, collected and refined over decades of work with medical professionals, which can guide others who are just getting into the ventilator design business to avoid costly and dangerous mistakes which have been made in the past, and also help them to produce ventilators which will have a better chance to meet the expectations of medical staff and the needs of patients.
If the world wants simple, easy to understand, open source designs for things like this, that needs to be incentivized so it will happen. The present economic system is just the opposite, concentrating knowledge and wealth in the hands of a few who become the gatekeepers to the "sacred life saving knowledge." I think Medtronic has taken an important symbolic first step to breaking down those barriers - as the critics point out, it's not going to help much - but if they erased all the barriers and published the CAD files, BOMs, supplier lists, etc., it would make the present situation worse.
Maybe (likely not, but maybe) this crisis will spur the design and development of a truly useful "open source" ventilator which uses readily available low cost components, easily serviced, easily maintained, easily operated. Nellcor-Puritan-Bennett (who designed the vent in the article long before being acquired by Medtronic) was incentivized in the opposite direction by the economic systems we all live under, so their parts are pretty hard to source - not too hard for normal sales volumes, but far too hard for once-in-a-century crisis response. By putting their requirements matrices, test procedures, and other IP out there, Medtronic has at least made it possible for such an open source design to succeed on the first try - without that knowledge any teams trying to make a state of the art ventilator would be going through the same decades long learning curve that Puritan-Bennett traveled to get to where they are. Maybe (likely not, but maybe) small, nimble (and highly capable) design teams can take this information and turn it from concept to production in 6 months or less, where the bigger established (risk averse) corporations take 2-4 years to turn a similar product development cycle.
Regardless of what the license says, the IP is out there and it will be copied. Expiry of the license at the end of the crisis just means that competitors won't be allowed to advertise "built to meet and exceed the specs of the Medtronic ventilator..." not that they won't be able to do just that.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 31 2020, @10:10PM (1 child)
Regardless of what the license says, the IP is out there and it will be copied. Expiry of the license at the end of the crisis just means that competitors won't be allowed to advertise "built to meet and exceed the specs of the Medtronic ventilator..." not that they won't be able to do just that.
I don't see how this license would prevent, for instance, Chinese manufacturers from building it and selling it in African countries.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 01 2020, @12:58AM
Yes, it's not preventing anything like that - though: Medtronic already has active design and production facilities in China, so Chinese startups would be competing against domestic engineers and factories with superior experience...
Anyone who wants to copy a 10 year old ventilator design now has more than enough info to do it, they'd need to establish their own choices of modern long-life parts into the design - as the guy said in the video, those microprocessors are mostly EOL now, as are many other parts, I'm sure. This isn't anything unusual - one major part of why new models of medical devices come out every 10 years or so is that the parts to build the old design get increasingly difficult/expensive to source.
🌻🌻 [google.com]