The man is a great American entrepreneur. His foresight always amazes me. And now he shows his humanitarian side - again.
It’s clear that Dean has a rather different reaction to FIRST teams working on ventilators than some folks in the CD community…
On Saturday, Kamen got an email about a team in Michigan. “They took apart their robot kit from last year’s competition and built a ventilator out of it,” he said.
There’s also a FIRST group in Israel that designed and built a small ventilator, Kamen said. They brought their machine to the Israeli equivalent of the FDA and a military hospital, and they have since built 500 of them, Kamen said.
The students are in the process of putting their plans into an open-source file for FIRST teams around the world. “If every one of the teams makes a couple ventilators, it will substantially increase the total number of ventilators available,” he said.
I’m not sure I would go as far as he does with his last statement (teams building ventilators for human use), but crowdsourcing ventilator concepts and then bringing those to professionals/companies for incorporation into a safe/certified product for mass production seems like a great thing for FIRST teams to do.
Just to be clear, it seems these are the heroes working with Microsoft Israel, Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, the national EMS service, and the Israeli Air Force to make respirators, which is decidedly not what most of those older CD posts are about. There are a number of active US projects as well actually partnered with the medical industry which also don’t fall into the dangerously under-baked CD category.
Gosh, how do I like a post multiple times?
Go out, inspire others to do amazing things, and let them like it for you.
That’s my new motto, thanks.
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