DESIGN ENGINEERING features Medical Design in the time of COVID by Treena Hein in the December 16, 2020 online edition. Subheaded: StarFish Medical pulls off near impossible design feat with development of the Winnipeg Ventilator 2.0, the article details the development of the Winnipeg Ventilator 2.0.
“Here’s a Canadian engineering challenge appropriate for 2020: Design a ventilator that doesn’t require parts from the medical device supply chain in a matter of months. Then, achieve full testing, verification and manufacturing of the ventilator design in roughly eight weeks. And of course, accomplish all of the above while under the local and global restrictions of a lethal pandemic.”
John Walmsley, StarFish Medical’s Executive VP of Strategic Relationships, shares details from the project: “There are many pressure sensors, redundancies, alarms and so on in a ventilator, and we wanted to design the firmware architecture from the ground up so that we could control all this and know it would validate against the necessary standards.”