Dyson has announced it will develop a new type of medical ventilator for NHS
bbc.com
bbc.com
You don't say. You can't just turn a vacuum cleaner into a ventilator by setting it to Blow instead of Suck. Medical devices take a very long time to develop, certify, build, release and develop training for because they're medical devices. The rule of thumb for consumer-grade hardware is it takes a minimum of one year from ideation to first delivery.
You want new ones fast, you get the manufacturers who make existing ones make more of them. The problem isn't that we're out of ventilator designs, it's that we're out of physical ventilators.
This feels like Elon's child-rescue submarine, and at least as far as COVID-19 it's likely to save exactly the same number of people.
Although I do wonder how much of a home-built solution will be "designed" versus, say "jury-rigged".
I guess nobody should stop him trying to make some of these at a crash pace, because there's a nonzero chance they might work out, but it does seem unlikely.
The problem isn't a lack of ventilator designs.
Maybe a new design can be built faster if it’s from the ground up. This can happen concurrently with ramping up existing manufacturing of vents.
Elon Musk's comments were unforgivable, though.
Send in more and more subs.
Developing a closed mask that doesn't contaminate everyone around them might do much good.
Speaking of Elon Musk, his initial plans from a few days ago to also produce some in-house has morphed into the saner goal of acquiring 1000+ units from China, which apparently have already arrived in LA: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-24/californi...
The potential risks of a medical device need to be weighed against the risks of not having it. Safety testing is less important when treating dying patients who have no other options.
If you're lying there, gasping for air, that's not the time for the nurse to wander by and ask if you liked the Dyson BlowMaster 8000 or the Siemens 300A Servo Ventilator, and to explain to you the pros and cons.
What you need is a proper, certified ventilator you can get by ramping production of existing ventilators, not starting over with some bits of sticky tape and string. You can force companies, in an emergency to produce them [1]. That's the only sane plan in an actual emergency.
Let's briefly break down the "treat like a child" bit. A child is someone who's not capable of making decisions. Neither is someone who needs a ventilator.
> Safety testing is less important when treating dying patients who have no other options.
Safety testing is more important because sometimes applying a useless device will do more harm than doing literally nothing. Something is not always better than nothing. How else can we, to your point, weigh the risks of having it vs not having it if we don't evaluate them?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950
I assume the term "need a ventilator" does not mean they have 100% chance of dying without a ventilator. Very few things in life are 100% certain. I imagine its more like, you have a 90% chance of dying without this, and a 10% chance of living (Numbers totally made up).
Its also not the case that a faulty ventilator might be worth 80% of a real ventilator. It may very well be 0%, it might be -20%. If the ventilator is worthless, well there are some strong ethical conundrums of selling worthless cures to desperate people who will pay anything for the slightest hope of surviving. But that's if its worthless, its entirely imaginable that a faulty one reduces patients chances relative to no ventilator. Doing nothing and letting the body do its best, might have better outcomes then doing some sort of medical intervention incorrectly.
I mean, are we watching too many science fiction movies?
Have we lost any connection to what it actually takes to make things?
With over thirty years in technology and manufacturing I would not touch the rapid development of a ventilator with a ten foot pole. As you correctly state, designing such devices takes years. And, beyond that, it takes decades of accumulated experience to inform the decisions and choices made during the design of any modern device. And then there's the years of testing, qualification and supply chain engineering.
No, the only way to make ventilators is to make more of an already proven design under the supervision of the companies already making them. In other words, expand their production capacity by retooling already capable manufacturing environments.
Watching the White House press briefings I can't help but feel that reporters must think Trump is Captain Picard who, armed with advanced replicators, can replicate mass quantities of anything within days. Oh, yes, and he must be Superman too.
In real life things take time. And if your industrial base has been almost completely off-shored, it takes even longer. If it's even possible at all.
Yeah, I've lost a lot of tolerance for this kind of stuff during the last few weeks. We are being treated to an amazing display of the Dunning-Kruger effect on a daily basis.
I mean, I just heard the media is on a war path blaming Trump for some guy in Arizona who "died after taking Chloroquine, the drug the President is pushing". Turns out nobody did their research and this guy decided to take a chemical used to clean fish tanks. Never mind that there was no doctor involved at all. Fish tank cleaner...and somehow our President is culpable?
We are witnessing ignorance being elevated to a virtue.
I usually have little patience for people who have no idea what the hell they're talking about, but I've been trying to give the benefit of the doubt since a lot of these people are probably extremely panicked and genuinely trying to help. Some people though... need an ass-kicking.
I did the math on COVID-19 back in early February and quickly recognized this was not going to be "just the flu". I made it a point to warn lots of people to get ready, buy supplies, etc. The number of people who laughed at me with the now familiar "just the flu" was alarming.
A good deal of my family members and friends who understand I am not an alarmist and don't say that kind of stuff lightly took my advice. I can't tell you how many calls I got over the last couple of weeks from them thanking me for the advance notice. None of them had to join the desperation and frenzy at our supermarkets. Everyone got ready for it back in February.
In the meantime I am trying to put hardware on the moon. It seems like such a distant idea given what's going on. My guess is Artemis is likely to suffer delays due to this pandemic and the funds we'll need to burn to keep afloat.
Terrible machines.
Since this pandemic, I've just stopped using them altogether.
And throwing away designs costs money. That’s why often it’s not until v2 or v3 of a product that they hit the right design. You often need the revenue from v1 and v2 to pay for more thrown away designs.
Although, I imagine the liberal application of far-UVC lighting for free air antiseptic purposes in the loo might mitigate the issue to an extent.
https://www.self.com/story/people-who-attended-this-sexy-neo...
https://www.dyson.com/hand-dryers/dyson-airblade-wash-dry-ov...
Somehow none of the geniuses in the design world have criticised that the 331mph Air Blade dryer, when pointed at a concave surface, i.e. the sink, would spit things right back in the opposite direction.
I've used this faucet/dryer while transiting through Reykjavik and you can see the remaining soap lather blown from the sink drain up over the counter and onto my shirt (and everywhere else).
It's an expensively flawed idea.
They are the absolute worst. How anyone thought it was a good idea is beyond me.
For all new buildings or products, any surface which is touched by hundreds of people each day needs to be redesigned to be contactless or to use materials that minimize transmission; products like hand dryers should pass standards that measure whether they spread bacteria or viruses; buildings and public transportation (buses, trains and planes) need to use HEPA filters to reduce airborne transmission risks, and to filter out air pollution; and sinks for hand washing need to become a standard feature at office receptions or entrances/exits.
We should also be able to reduce the normally accepted steady state of deaths, ill health and economic impacts from flu and other unnecessary sickness.
But this is going to be more and more necessary as global disease transmission becomes easier. It could be a new strain of flu or a drug resistant TB next year. There has to be defence in depth and in advance, not just hoping always for a magic fix after the problem has occurred.
It turns out that copper can not only kill bacteria but also degrades naked dna/rna strands, preventing gene transfer between species. Problem is, the last time we were still using brass a lot, it was all lacquered in plastic.
But to your point, the intake vents are mounted very low on the side, and I think I'd feel a lot better about recirculation if the intakes were farther above the outlets.
http://www.alliedhpi.com/mcv.htm
They have already gone through the regulatory approval process and the cheapest model was retailing at about $3,000 and not the $50,000 number Ive seen tossed about for models with all the modern bells and whistles.
When you need to ramp up production quickly, simpler is better.
But seriously, good to see so many companies stepping up to just get things done, and to see (more or less) regulations being set aside or handled speedily.
The only two sane approaches would be that copyright owners provide temporary, free licenses to other manufacturers (heck, even make the government pay a royalty for each unit) or the government to force the companies to provide the designs.
Neither option would be favored by either UK or US right now, because the cult of free enterprise is more important than human loss.
There is no evidence this pandemic will be over at any time in the near or long term future, just a thus far folorn hope. For all we know it will persist for a couple of waves of death, then as a mutation, year on year. The fragility of our health systems has been exposed and the ability of manufacturers to ramp up production, or even share designs[0] so they can be fixed in the meantime, has also been show to be lacking so some competition in the space to
a) produce more ventilators
b) hopefully produce better ventilators
c) make them cheaper
cannot be a bad thing. The chances of having an antiviral or vaccine before Dyson completes a viable ventilator are also pie in the sky, so pick your horse and back it, it's all going to be too late for too many.
[0] Italians Found Way to 3-D Print Key Ventilator Piece for $1 to Help Battle Coronavirus—So the Company With the Patent Is Threatening to Sue https://citizentruth.org/italians-found-way-to-3-d-print-key...
"WILL DEVELOP", NOT "DEVELOPS".
Hair and dust gets stuck in the weirdest places, requiring a screwdriver to clean properly (or the power just cuts off due to blockages). The connection between the motorised head, tube, and the main body also seems to be insecure. Normal forward and back motion will interrupt the connection and it stops spinning. For such an expensive product, I'm not happy with the replacement parts I've had to buy for that issue.
I chose the V7 because it was the cheapest / oldest model with the new ejection mechanism.
I don't think the design of the motorised head was good at all, since as I said I found hair and dust got through the cracks into the housing and I needed star shaped screwdrivers to get in there and clean it.
And the main body has a flimsy flap that opens/closes with airflow, but it gets stuck very easily with our dust situation. So I have to pick at it down the tube (awkward), unscrew it, or hope running water flushes it (tends to just consolidate the dust into paste). If the flap stops moving the motor cuts off every few seconds.
Overall it was great for a year or two but for the price (and based on our consumer laws here in AU) I'd expect 5-10 years of service for such a vacuum cleaner. It now needs a lot of TLC and cleaning compared to our bagged Miele roller.
We use our Miele cat&dog model less than we should, but when we do it's noticeably stronger. Cord & bag is just inconvenient after you get used to the Dyson for daily touch ups (I swear my dog puts 90% of his calories into hair production).
I've gotten 20 years of use out of their original upright vacuum model so far.
This should be obvious, private companies don't have red-tape, private companies for the most part have better talent, and private companies work at a much higher throughput and level of efficiency. I've stated all along the solutions to this crisis are going to come from US companies for the most part, not from government (excluding capital stimulus). For this reason, we should all be supporting a fiscal package that stimulates business and corporations to get out of this.
And why do you think it applies to government workers but not private workers?