Abstract
Distributed digital manufacturing offers a solution to medical supply and technology shortages during pandemics. To prepare for the next pandemic, this study reviews the state-of-the-art of open hardware designs needed in a COVID-19-like pandemic. It evaluates the readiness of the top twenty technologies requested by the Government of India. The results show that the majority of the actual medical products have some open source development, however, only 15% of the supporting technologies required to produce them are freely available. The results show there is still considerable research needed to provide open source paths for the development of all the medical hardware needed during pandemics. Five core areas of future research are discussed, which include (i) technical development of a wide-range of open source solutions for all medical supplies and devices, (ii) policies that protect the productivity of laboratories, makerspaces, and fabrication facilities during a pandemic, as well as (iii) streamlining the regulatory process, (iv) developing Good-Samaritan laws to protect makers and designers of open medical hardware, as well as to compel those with knowledge that will save lives to share it, and (v) requiring all citizen-funded research to be released with free and open source licenses.
Highlights
Pandemics stress critical infrastructures, and hospitals can be challenged [1,2,3,4,5]
The documentation to obtain free and open source hardware (FOSH) is substantial and most projects were not able to meet the rigorous requirements, as shown in the results below for each of the top 20 requested medical supplies requested by the Indian government during the COVD-19 pandemic
A recent review of open source ventilators was completed in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic [137] which found that the peer-reviewed and vetted systems [138,139,140,141,142,143,144] lacked complete documentation and the “open source” ventilator systems that were documented [145] were either at the very early stages of design and lacked testing, or only had basic testing
Summary
Hospitals can be challenged [1,2,3,4,5]. The health care systems have the technology and staff to care for some patients, but not the volume of patients observed during surges brought about by a rapidly spreading virus These challenges were met with two strategies: first, by pre-planning and stockpiling equipment, supplies, and medication [16,17,18,19,20,21,22], and second, by using policies equivalent to the American Defense Production Act, which allows the President to direct private companies to produce equipment needed for a national emergency [23,24,25]. During a global pandemic, there is a conflict of interest between countries, which inhibits the global supply chains (e.g., export bans of medical equipment) [41,42,43,44]), as well as in-fighting for medical supplies within countries, states, and hospitals [45]
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