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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday March 31 2020, @02:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the DIY dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 31 2020, @10:10PM (1 child)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday March 31 2020, @10:10PM (#977809)

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 01 2020, @12:58AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday April 01 2020, @12:58AM (#977865)

    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.

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