Abstract

 
 
 When the COVID-19 pandemic hits Portugal in early March 2020, medical doctors, engineers and researchers, with the encouragement of the Northern Region Health Administration, teamed up to develop and build, locally and in a short time, a ventilator that might eventually be used in extreme emergency situations in the hospitals of northern Portugal. This letter tells you the story of Pneuma, a low-cost emergency ventilator designed and built under harsh isolation constraints, that gave birth to derivative designs in Brazil and Morocco, has been industrialized with 200 units being produced and is now looking forward to the certification as a medical device that will possibly support a go-to-market launch. Open intellectual property (IP), multidisciplinarity teamwork, fast prototyping and product engineering have shortened to a few months an otherwise quite longer idea-to-product route, clearly demonstrating that when scientific and engineering knowledge hold hands great challenges can be successfully faced.
 
 
Highlights
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the country in early March 2020, some of these companies and research and innovation institutions became restless and refused to be kept hostage of the situation
When the COVID-19 pandemic hits Portugal in early March 2020, medical doctors, engineers and researchers, with the encouragement of the Northern Region Health Administration, teamed up to develop and build, locally and in a short time, a ventilator that might eventually be used in extreme emergency situations in the hospitals of northern Portugal
They all wanted to contribute to Open-Air, but when the initiative grew out of proportion, networking many hundreds of people, and the management model became too complex, they had a feeling that the outcome of all this generous effort would risk arriving too late to help fighting the pandemic. Knowing all these efforts in the Open-Air initiative, the Northern Region Health Administration (ARS-Norte) has contacted the group at INESC TEC with the challenge: would they be able to develop and build, locally and in a short time, a ventilator that might eventually be used in extreme emergency situations in the hospitals of northern Portugal? This was the beginning of Pneuma
Summary
The investment in science and technology that Portugal has consistently pursued for the last three decades, along with the opening of the access of the higher education system to an increasing number of students, resulted in a highly-qualified young population in many areas where European and global labour markets are under pressure This is the case of biotech and health, as well as computer science and almost all engineering domains. The potential behind all that lies in highly-qualified people and in an increasing number of companies and institutions, such as universities and research labs, building a dynamic innovative fabric They all compete globally in their specialization domains, making the most. Of their scientific and technical knowledge, international networking, design competences and manufacturing capabilities
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