[Goose]

There would be advantages to engineers working to strip out unnecessary modes and simplify (and cheapen) ventilators.  In normal times, you might build a general purpose ventilator that can deal with any possible issue that comes up and can perform all sorts of complicated ventilation modes.  But in this case, you are building for speed and cost, so you strip out all unnecessary modes, all complicated UI's and include only the bare essentials (plus you want to make it easy to use in case you are short respiratory therapists in a crisis).


You can probably strip down a vent to have a power switch and four nobs: the percent oxygen (20 - 100%), the mode (whether the vent delivers a constant pressure or fixed volume), the backup respiratory rate, and the pressure or volume delivered, and you build it to recognize and alarm if there is an obstruction and if the tube gets disconnected.



BC

All True. But none of that will matter in the next two weeks. Getting the paperwork out to the assemblers and the new test instructions to QA will take longer than that. I also imagine there are some at least minimal FDA device approvals in play. I have had many instances in my career as an engineer where we had great ideas to simplify a device. When we went to the production people they said it would cost more and take longer to remove the extra functions than to just build what we had. If you have a large quantity and some time, yes. Two weeks, even probably a month, it is just going to slow you down.

[Goose]

There would be advantages to engineers working to strip out unnecessary modes and simplify (and cheapen) ventilators.  In normal times, you might build a general purpose ventilator that can deal with any possible issue that comes up and can perform all sorts of complicated ventilation modes.  But in this case, you are building for speed and cost, so you strip out all unnecessary modes, all complicated UI's and include only the bare essentials (plus you want to make it easy to use in case you are short respiratory therapists in a crisis).


You can probably strip down a vent to have a power switch and four nobs: the percent oxygen (20 - 100%), the mode (whether the vent delivers a constant pressure or fixed volume), the backup respiratory rate, and the pressure or volume delivered, and you build it to recognize and alarm if there is an obstruction and if the tube gets disconnected.



BC

All True. But none of that will matter in the next two weeks. Getting the paperwork out to the assemblers and the new test instructions to QA will take longer than that. I also imagine there are some at least minimal FDA device approvals in play. I have had many instances in my career as an engineer where we had great ideas to simplify a device. When we went to the production people they said it would cost more and take longer to remove the extra functions than to just build what we had. If you have a large quantity and some time, yes. Two weeks, even probably a month, it is just going to slow you down.