Medical Electronics


Oxford and King’s developing prototype for rapidly deployable ventilator


An interdisciplinary team of engineers and medics is addressing ways to increase the UK’s capacity for ventilator manufacture


E


ngineers, anaesthetists and surgeons from the University of Oxford and King’s College London


are building and testing prototypes that can be manufactured using techniques and tools available in well-equipped university and small and medium enterprise (SME) workshops. The team, led by Oxford Professors


Andrew Farmery, Mark Thompson and Alfonso Castrejon-Pita and King's College London’s Dr Federico Formenti, have been working to define novel mechanisms of operation that will meet the required specifications for safe and reliable function. The design aims to exploit off-the-shelf components and equipment. The researchers are working in response


to UK government calls to increase the country’s ventilator manufacturing capacity due to COVID-19. Demonstrating safety and reliability and achieving regulatory


approval of the opensource design will be necessary, and once this has been achieved, the approach could unlock potential for a new kind of distributed manufacturing effort. Government coordination and ongoing


rapid competitive selection of the best design concepts will enable universities, SMEs and large industry to make and assemble these ventilators close to their local NHS services. This may allow local scaling according to demand, and reduce stress on NHS distribution. Professor Thompson, Oxford’s


department of engineering science, says: “This extraordinary situation demands an extraordinary response and we are pulling all the talents together in an exceptional team combining decades of experience translating research into the clinic, brilliant innovators, and highly skilled technicians.”


Professor Farmery, Oxford’s Nuffield


department of clinical neurosciences, says: “Ordinarily, to develop a medical device such as this would be a huge task, and would take years. We have designed a simple and robust ventilator which will serve the specific task of managing the very sickest patients during this crisis. “By pooling available expertise from


inside and outside the University, and making the design freely available to local manufacturers, we are pleased to be able to respond to this challenge so quickly.” Within a matter of weeks it is hoped


a prototype could be developed which would satisfy MHRA (the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) requirements, and the scientists believe a mature manufacturing network at scale could be achievable within two to three months. The Department of Engineering Science has committed to support prototyping


efforts and the team is looking for options to develop regulatory approval. The next steps are ensuring the prototype has buy in from all stakeholders, especially healthcare staff, and to demonstrate compliance with the MHRA requirements of performance, safety and reliability. Professor Mark Thompson says: “The


academic partners can provide free to use plans and designs available for download; central communication with workshops at Oxford to provide advice; step-by-step videos and guides for assembly; along with videos to facilitate training and use.” King’s College London have offered


the use of their workshops to manufacture/3D print bespoke components. Dr Formenti says: “We are also aiming to share the know-how and refinement of this relatively inexpensive approach with other countries.”


oxvent.org


Building a supercomputer to fight COVID-19 H


elio AG, creator of an open platform that connects idle data center compute to enable the execution of


large-scale workloads, is making its compute delivery network available free of charge for any research organisation, laboratory, university or other compute- intensive applications. In an effort to support the international research community, Helio is announcing that it will open its entire compute infrastructure free of charge to anyone working on COVID-19 and related research or applications. This empowers these organisations with the extra computing power needed to more


www.cieonline.co.uk


effectively and quickly model solutions to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers around the world are


quickly trying to understand the virus and develop an immunisation program. What in earlier days would have been done with hundreds of manual experiments in laboratories is now often done with the aid of computers. Testing billions of combinations of substances and simulating the virus’s response requires an incredible amount of computing resources — especially when it’s needed on short timelines. To aid this process, Helio’s proprietary platform is rapidly connecting


data centers across Europe to help researchers get the computing resources they need. The Helio platform connects a


network of individual data centers to more efficiently perform computing tasks, such as the rendering of 3D films and animations or the simulation of physical phenomena. Kevin Häfeli, founder and CEO of Helio,


notes, “Switzerland is very much affected by the virus, and we started to wonder how we can help. We have worked with research organisations in the past and know that often the availability of


Components in Electronics April 2020 17 helio.exchange


computing resources is a key challenge. To do our bit, we will open up our network for anyone to use and make our team available to help connect computing tasks on short notice.”


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