A challenge benefiting teams and the world.
All 213 designs are available to the public on the Stratasys GrabCAD site. They trickled in over a period of weeks so teams could see what each of them were doing. Not that it helped. “Frankly, there wasn’t time,” Zarem says. “We either do our best work or get caught up in what everyone else is doing. Plus, on the one hand, you want to win, but the whole goal is toe. Make sure a ventilator is out there in the world that can make a difference.”
As a top-three finisher, the VOX team won credits for parts on demand from Stratasys Direct, but the experience was worth even more. “The dire urgency of the need, especially in the early days of then pandemic, put everyone in the mindset of having to give it their all for a short amount of time, and that really allowed for a lot of great work in a short amount of time,” Zarem says. “Stratasys and our other partners really shared in that urgency to move faster.”
Added Béhar, “Medical devices are very complex, expensive, usually hard to use, hard to decipher, and easy to make mistakes on, and and I don’t think the industry has been addressed enough by design. What designers have shown they can do in other fields to make things more efficient, safer, easier to use, and open source would benefit medical systems greatly.”
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