This year, GlobalData estimated the need for an additional 880,000 ventilators worldwide to cope with the demand caused by the coronavirus outbreak. Ventilators get oxygen to a person’s lungs while removing carbon dioxide, essential for patients who are too sick to breathe on their own. Using a ventilator can give the patient time to fight off the infection and recover. 

Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) took on the challenge to design a ventilator tailored to treat coronavirus (COVID-19) patients that could be mass-produced and gain government approval. It took just 37 days for the team to create a device called VITAL (Ventilator Intervention Technology Accessible Locally). VITAL will free up the nation's limited supply of traditional ventilators. 

Fast track FDA approval

NASA received expedited approval from the United States national health and medical approval body, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the device via an emergency use authorization, a fast-track approval process developed for crises that take just days rather than years. Since VITAL’s development, 28 manufacturers around the world have been licensed to make the device. Another iteration of the ventilator that uses an air compressor also received a ventilator Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA.

VITAL can be built faster and maintained more easily than a traditional ventilator and is composed of far fewer parts. It can also be modified to fit alternative health care settings such as the coronavirus specific field hospitals, which are being set up across the country and around the globe. Like all ventilators, VITAL requires patients to be sedated and an oxygen tube inserted into their airway to breathe. VITAL isn’t a replacement for traditional high-end hospital ventilators that can last for years and be used on patients with multiple complex conditions, rather the device is intended to be used during the duration of the pandemic and is specifically tailored for COVID-19 patients.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech 

VITAL and Supplyframe

Visibility into global electronics supply chains was essential for JPL to be able to create a device that others could replicate without facing any component or part supply issues. In the video above, Erika Earl shares her experience working with the JPL team on the VITAL project. She discusses how Supplyframe’s software solutions helped her and the team quickly pinpoint components that would benefit their design and keep the pressure off conventional medical supply chains. 

To build supply resiliency into the design while avoiding interfering with existing medical supply chains already under strain. Erika used Supplyframe’s design intelligence software to search for similar components to their needs outside of the medical industry. The platform allowed the hardware and supply chain engineers to see into suppliers’ stock levels and availability. Supplyframe's Design to Source Intelligence uses data from the electronics value chain to surface Insights for stakeholders across the design cycle. Read a more in-depth look at the way DSI is collapsing the electronics industry design cycles here. 

Supplyframe recognizes the impacts on the global electronics supply chain and has begun developing resources that can help organizations better cope with the current situation and future product designs. These resources include their white paper on the mandate for transformation in NPI and supporting a global survey of stakeholders across the electronics supply chain to identify opportunities for improvement across the industry. 

Innovation in scarcity

The demand for ventilators has spurred many design teams to deliver a robust, scalable design within a short time frame. Dyson reportedly spent 20 million pounds developing a new ventilator called CoVent in just two weeks in response to a UK government request. RespiraWorks is an open-source volunteer-run organization developing a ventilator that is affordable and easy to build in countries with developing economies and low-resource communities. The team described their own challenges working with an under-pressure supply chain in this webinar. 

Other ventilator related projects are also underway. Researchers at Eindhoven University have improved ventilators performance by a factor of ten using a technique based on self-learning algorithms. The Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) is developing a device that could be attached to a ventilator to enable two COVID patients to receive tailored respiratory support if needed in an emergency.

Looking forward

The need for resilient supply chains that can respond to the fluctuations created by unexpected events such as the global coronavirus pandemic is clear. Leveraging existing data within design cycles and from the supply chain is essential to creating future-proof and resilient products and systems critical to beating this crisis while preventing the next. 

About the sponsor: Supplyframe

This article is sponsored by Supplyframe. Supplyframe aligns electronics demand with supply and brings new levels of resiliency to the global electronics value chain, with transformative, intelligence-based solutions to deliver insights at key decision points throughout the entire design-to-source product lifecycle. Leveraging billions of continuous signals of design intent, demand, supply, and risk factors, Supplyframe’s Design-to-Source Intelligence (DSI) Platform is the world’s richest intelligence resource for the electronics industry. Over 10 million engineering and supply chain professionals worldwide engage with our SaaS solutions, search engines, and media properties to power rapid innovation and optimize in excess of $120 billion in annual direct materials spend. Supplyframe is headquartered in Pasadena, Calif., with offices in Austin, Belgrade, Grenoble, Oxford, San Francisco, Shanghai, and Shenzhen.