Thanks COVID-19 For The Opportunity
Due to the COVID-19 epidemic, the demand for ventilators has dramatically exceeded the existing supply. Full-featured ventilators that are commonly used in hospitals and many medical facilities are not only expensive to manufacture, but require medical professionals complete extensive, time consuming training to use the ventilators to their maximum effect. The Kroleo team comprises of skillful engineers from NASA and have developed a safe, low-cost cost ventilator by leveraging the team’s extensive experience and demonstrable track record of success with 3D printing, rapid prototyping, and manufacturing. This ventilator will utilize 3D printed parts, and inexpensive, easily attainable sensors to achieve a price point of below $500. We have launched a Gofundme campaign to raise capital for this effort, with the goal of using these funds to scale up production for this proposed low cost ventilator. The solution will ultimately benefit victims from COVID-19 in many parts of the world that would otherwise lack the resources to provide assisted breathing.
We are not the only ones. There are numerous other ventilator projects around the world that have confirmed our thinking and inspired us to proceed. In Colombia, five universities have worked on their own ventilators separately, and three of them designed prototypes that are already being tested to comply with the requirements set by national regulators. In beginning of April, Rice University announced plans of ApolloBVM, an open-source emergency ventilator design that is now freely available to anyone online. In mid-April, the FDA granted an emergency use authorization (EUA) for a low cost ventilator developed by Boston Scientific and University of Minnesota. Rosario National University of Argentina has also built and shared its low-cost ventilator concept online for anyone to access. In addition, a team of female robotics experts in Afghanistan revealed in mid-April their development actions of a low-cost ventilator made of Toyota car parts.
Why are we doing this? We could just obey the quarantine, while sulking in our sorrow over our unprepared response to COVID19. We could do that. Or we can make the choice to suck it up, roll up our sleeves and get to work. Marc Andreessen said it best in his recent blog post “You don’t just see this smug complacency, this satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build, in the pandemic, or in healthcare generally. You see it throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life.” With COVID19, we could view this scenario as a serious threat to our society, or the greatest opportunity of a generation. We have all the necessary resources to get the job done, now it’s up to us take a collaborative bottom up approach, leveraging technology and other inputs to solve the colossal problems we face.
This bottom up collaborative approach is possible with the open-source model. The open-source movement is branched from the free-software movement which began in the late 80s with the launching of the GNU project by Richard Stallman. This approach is a decentralized model of software development which fosters open collaboration. One central concept of the development of open-source software is peer creation, with items such as source code, blueprints, and documents freely accessible to the public. The open source movement is nothing new, collaborative open source software projects such as Linux and Apache have demonstrated the potential to create, manage, improve and extend a broad and complex code framework in a non-proprietary environment. Open source is not limited to just technology, teams around the world have launched open source initiatives around beer, cola, and even pharmaceutical drug development. Not to mention the vast amounts of informative content and media on sites like Wikipedia and YouTube. Blogs and podcasts are also great examples, with people expressing their opinions and experiences on a global scale open to everyone who wants to listen, watch or learn. While most people would never have expected that a program based on people working for free would succeed, open source theory has had a significant influence on the developer community. The thing to keep in mind is that open source embraces the sharing ethos, and because of this, issues like piracy are no longer a problem. Individuals are encouraged to share and distribute open source software as much as they wish- contributors can copy and redistribute, even after changes have been made. This dynamic gives a consumer independence that cannot be obtained from proprietary goods and creates tremendous opportunities for companies and industries around the world, especially in developing countries.
This is not a technology problem, this is a cultural problem, teams must be able to build together in a decentralized manner and collaborate across multiple channels. It’s no longer about building technology companies/startups, technology is ubiquitous in the information age, just like electricity and oil is ubiquitous in the late industrial age. Seriously, what does it mean to be a ‘tech company’ now? Forget TAM and valuation, there won’t be a total market to address or valuation to be discovered if we do not act now. There is no such thing as ‘no solution’ — we must keep iterating until we find a solution. We have the channels, we have the technology, the question is whether we have the will to rise to the occasion and deliver, I believe that we can, and we will. Onwards and upwards!
