Beyond the Blueprint: Leveraging Open Source Design to Solve COVID-19 Medical Supply Shortages
An interview with Patrick Wilkie, a community builder, social entrepreneur, and Executive Director of COSMIC (Collaborative Open Source Medical Innovations for COVID-19) + OPPORTUNITY to get involved!
Let’s face it: the remnants of the COVID-19 pandemic will linger around even years after the roll-out of new tests, treatments, and vaccines. If anything though, we’ve learned our lesson — in face of a virus that has no regard for international borders, “global health” is inescapably the health of our own communities. No country could grit through it alone; it was the mutual sharing of medical supplies, equipment, information, and funding that allowed us to build resilience in our healthcare systems. A non-profitable organization, COSMIC Medical, emerged to be a key player in addressing this space by bringing medical supply accessibility world-wide.
As a partner for one of our future projects, we invited COSMIC’s Patrick Wilkie for an interview to highlight their incredible work in leveraging open-source tech and design to address this dire global problem. Stay tuned until the end of the article for opportunities to get involved with COSMIC’s highly-impactful medical device projects!
What’s your background and how did you end up at COSMIC?
I’m a 2018 graduate from UBC’s Bachelors in Electrical Engineering program. I founded MELT Collective, a circular economy start-up that focuses on closing the loop and decentralizing recycling to ultimately reduce the carbon and economic cost of recycling this material. I’m stoked about bio-design — in 2018 I invented (with a team, naturally) the mycelium toilet, “MYCOmmunity Toilet” for distributed sanitation for temporary settlements.
I have been working in open source design since 2016, but when the pandemic hit, I started looking for ways to use it to solve unique and sudden challenges with medical supply accessibility. In COSMIC’s early phases I got involved with both the organization’s strategy and technical hardware development for the Gravity Ventilator project. It was the synthesis of these two roles — my ability to bridge both the zoomed-in technical details, and the zoomed-out mission and direction of the organization — that eventually led to becoming Executive Director of COSMIC Medical.
What’s the story behind how COSMIC started and what is its role in accessible healthcare?
When the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11, Dr. Christopher Nguan, a Kidney Transplant Surgeon and Urologist at Vancouver General Hospital, found himself with unexpected time on his hands as surgeries were canceled to augment capacity at the hospital in the event of a COVID surge. Dr. Nguan issued a call-to-action with former students, Dr. Philip Edgcumbe, a UBC radiology resident and biomedical engineer, and Alex Waslen, a UBC engineering student, to come up with an idea for a low-cost ventilator to address the anticipated worldwide shortage. In less than six weeks COSMIC Medical designed a ventilator prototype. The Gravity Ventilator — or gVent — was awarded the $100,000 Roche Canada COVID-19 Innovation Challenge based on its unique inverted piston and water seal design; an affordable, mechanically simple and resilient design, optimized for disaster relief.
Since then, COSMIC has grown into a team of 150+ multi-disciplinary volunteers and has designed other novel devices such as the Clinical Respiratory Support System, the Bubble Helmet, the Snorkel Mask, and an oxygen concentrator to address oxygen supply shortages globally.
COSMIC’s mission is to create abundant access to medical equipment around the world with open-source design solutions. We’re preparing for the worst-case scenario, addressing the severe global shortage of medical supplies and equipment to fight the pandemic, so that no healthcare system has to triage the importance of patients’ lives.
Why open source?
The way the current medical device licensing process is set up hinders innovation: it’s slow and expensive. Companies also only focus on the long tail: 20% of problems that affect 80% of their users. Open source allows for unbounded collaboration with people around the world, opening up the potential to solve the other 80% of problems that affect the 20%. Design concepts and ‘recipes’, once available to the public, allow communities to adopt and adapt the solutions for their own needs, and then manufacture them on a local or regional scale.
From an organizational standpoint, open source helps eliminate transactional costs: the time, money, and resources to onboard and train people. They can attract people who actually have the suitable skills and expertise to solve problems, while allowing people already in the organization to focus their energy on what’s important.
All in all, any problem is solvable given the right set of eyes — and if those eyes are the entire world, we are much more likely to solve some of the world’s biggest problems.
How does COSMIC serve international communities?
Although geo-located in Vancouver, COSMIC has a very international team. Volunteers have family and social networks all across the world, from India, to Iran, to China. Co-creating medical devices rely heavily on understanding the needs of different communities we are not in, so these connections help us to inform our research and areas of focus.
Our priority is establishing an international network of doctors and community leaders that can supply us with information about their healthcare problems and needs. Once we know this information, we can create design solutions suited for the available infrastructure. For example, there’s no use in a medical device that has a square peg when the community only has round holes. We need information about the holes prior to designing pegs. The next step would be to increase supply chains and then distribute the equipment to low-resource health systems.
What is your advice for students wanting to start their own non-profits, projects, initiatives, etc?
The first question you should ask yourself is what specifically are you trying to get done in the real world. Do you want to build things, make tools, change people’s minds?
What’s stopping you from doing that today, without any organization to help? What people do you absolutely need to involve to get your desired job done?
Find those people and do it.
Want to get involved with COSMIC Medical?
COSMIC is looking for mission-driven volunteers to contribute in a variety of areas: from software, electrical, chemical, and mechanical engineering to fundraising and outreach. You can browse the roles below and sign up to help on their website, and contribute directly via their GitHub repo!
