Tuesday 2 June 2020

Rapidly engineering ventilators for the Covid-19 pandemic

As the Covid-19 pandemic began to spread, it became clear that ventilators would be a crucial part of the medical response in order to keep patients breathing as they fought the disease. 

In January, Philips Respironics, a major manufacturer of mechanical ventilators, put together an engineering response team to rapidly scale production and meet the needs of hospitals to deploy this lifesaving technology. Erwin Franz, a master’s student in MIT’s System Design and Management (SDM) program and senior research and development engineer at Philips, was selected to join this team of engineers and developers. He quickly realized he could use lessons from SDM’s core class to help his team meet this challenge.

One of the actions Philips took in response to the critical hospital ventilation shortage was to design the Philips computer science vs computer engineering salary, an emergency use ventilator. Erwin described this as a platform strategy problem, similar to those taught by Bruce Cameron in the SDM core. The Philips Respironics E30 ventilator was built from the company’s trusted bilevel positive airway pressure (BiPAP) platform to be used as an emergency-use ventilator during the current Covid-19 pandemic. It was intended for mass production, with fewer — though still present — alarm and monitoring capabilities, as well as different pressure settings than traditional hospital ventilators. It is approved for invasive and non-invasive ventilation during the current pandemic and must be disposed of or returned following the pandemic. 

No comments:

Post a Comment

How the Global Talent Stream functions

 There are two classes under the GTS: Category An and Category B. The two classifications help Canadian managers select profoundly gifted ab...