CoVent-19 Challenge: The finalists

Seven teams have been selected to participate in the final round of the CoVent-19 Challenge.

More than 200 teams from all around the world submitted designs for a rapidly deployable, minimum viable ventilator as part of a hackathon hosted on GrabCAD.com. Round one of the competition ended on May 1^st 2020.

The seven finalists will be expected to build working prototypes which will be tested by a team of judges, led by a dozen anaesthesiology resident physicians from Massachusetts General Hospital.

Dr. Richard Boyer, founder and director of the CoVent-19 Challenge, commented: “Healthcare systems around the world continue to face a period of great uncertainty caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Will they be able to provide invasive mechanical ventilation to all who need it? As anaesthesiologists, we are experts at using ventilators to care for critical ill patients and believe there is an opportunity for innovative new designs particularly for areas where standard mechanical ventilators may be hard to obtain.”

The seven finalist teams are as follows:

• SmithVent, a team of Smith College (Northampton, Mass.) engineering alumni and friends.
• CoreVent, submitted by Ross Hunter of Armadilla (Edinburgh, Scotland).
• InVent Pneumatic Ventilator, submitted by fuseproject (a design and innovation firm from San Francisco), Cionic (a medical device technology company from San Francisco), and Accenture (a mechanical engineering team from Seattle).
• RespiraWorks, a global team of dozens of engineers, healthcare workers and other professionals with a focus on developing countries and low-resource communities.
• OP Vent, submitted by a team from Nvidia (Santa Clara, Calif.), Waymo (Mountain View, Calif.), Stanford University (Palo Alto, Calif.), and VA Palo Alto Health Care System.
• Lung Evolve, submitted by an engineering team from the Universidad Nacional (Bogotá, Colombia) and Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (Medellín, Colombia).
• Baxter Ventilator, submitted by a team of educators, students, and alumni from Baxter Academy for Technology and Science (Portland, Maine).   

Talking about the challenge, Stratasys chief innovation officer, Scott Crump, who is also one of the challenge judges, said: “The CoVent-19 Challenge has been an amazing demonstration of what’s possible when a global community of innovators comes together for the common good.

“In one month, we have gone from a problem statement to remarkably creative solutions from students and professionals, engineers and designers, from everywhere. It brightens my spirit during what is otherwise a pretty dark time for our world.” 

Stratasys, who hosted the challenge on its GrabCAD site, has also provided a team of three application engineers to work with the seven finalist teams to help them build working prototypes utilising Stratasys 3D printers if needed. The prototypes will then be evaluated using a test bed to determine which design provides the best combination performance against safety, reliability, manufacturability, affordability, and simplicity. 

A winner is anticipated to be named by the beginning of June. The CoVent-19 Challenge residents will then aim to work with the winning team to bring the product to market, and secure FDA approval for the device.

The CoVent-19 Challenge is also sponsored by Ximedica, Valispace, HackFund and Yelling Mule.