CoroVent

COVID19CZ is a collaboration between the Czech tech industry, educational institutions, government and average citizens, crowdsourcing and organizing efforts to fight the Covid-19 epidemic.

While there are groups focusing on data, call centers, logistics, protective equipment, etc., the potential need for emergency ventilators became obvious early on.

After fielding and eventually dismissing “easy fix” ideas, such as the Ambu bag automation or multiple patients per ventilator, we fortunately got in contact with the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering at the Czech Technical University, specifically with a group of people who have spent years working on various ventilator designs.

We quickly focused our efforts on creating a support network for their work – to allow the opportunity for their designs to materialize, all the while enlisting the help of leading engineering companies and component manufacturers to assist.

From the onset, we are collaborating under the understanding that the design and any learnings are open source, to be used freely around the world as the need arises.