While Covid-19 was driving around the world, fitness systems faced a shortage of non-public protective devices. This essential device has become more expensive and is more import-dependent. 3-d printing has suddenly and urgently become a critical tool for managing the shortage of non-public protective devices (PPE), enthusiasts and other medical devices.
Manufacturers around the world have started donating their gadgets to create face shields and fans. Companies in the commercial 3D design and printing industries, my company, Dassault Systems, have shared EPI designs and software licenses. Creators, students, teachers, hobbyists, inventors, designers and engineers around the world have presented their own 3D printing projects.
These important collaborations have demonstrated how industry, universities, and Americans can meet a challenge like Covid-19. However, something is missing: an open platform available to “paste” all those disparate elements into a connected community.
In the best Covid-19 typhoon, the shortage of PPE and important medical devices and the adoption of 3-d printing to make them revealed a disconnect between desires and solutions: which hospitals urgently needed appliances and what types of apparatus they wanted? How can they win a device when businesses and cities were blocked? What types of PPE are of maximum effectiveness and can be adapted to SARS-CoV-2 or even improved?
To fill those and other gaps, Dassault Systems has introduced OPENCovid19, an open online network (links marked with an asterisk must be loose but must be registered on the network’s website).
While frontline fitness professionals and lifeguards battle the new coronavirus, others have come together to forge cutting-edge tactics for speech and percentages of resources, wisdom and experience. This pressing need has highlighted the contributions of collective intelligence that leads to the immediate and effective delivery of essential 3D-published solutions. This diversity, from a prototype intelligent fan, evolved through a start-up in India within 8 days of product conceptualization, to a fan in Mexico, which is now qualified through the country’s Department of Health, to a head strap, which designed a plastic face protector. through a team of engineering experts at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the United States.
Collaborative virtual platforms catalyze this type of united front to fulfill the promise and perspective of 3D printing. They enable connections between other people and projects in other parts of the world, combining disparate forces in a symbiotic effort to find, co-design, certify and deploy devices that print seamlessly in 3-D for desires located in record time.
Hundreds of other people and organizations have joined the online network collaboration efforts less than a month after its launch. Percentage of concepts and concepts, benefit from access to qualified tutoring and assignments until they mature. This open innovation covers the initial validation of the feasibility of allocation in terms of production and applicability that uses software, design and engineering expertise to shape a product and extends to the medical feedback phase that identifies its value.
With this online community, engineers can optimize designs and fabrics for 3D printing. Designers can make old designs more powerful and faster. Medical experts can verify and validate personal protective equipment or fan dispatchers, providing data on improvements, before they are manufactured.
Simulation experts have worked with designers to optimize 3D printed face mask projects by simulating the trajectory of a human sneeze. This data is used to temporarily explore the design of the shield, adding length, width and distance between individuals. Known scientific advice where the debris fell on and under the shield, and what facets of the shield design can be improved.
Linking these concepts to adulthood is imperative, but we will have to move further: to online markets and production laboratories (“Fab Labs”) with qualified factories that use supported fabrics and processes, and which have contributed the expressions of their machines, in a safe environment. Its 3-d printing functions have been a lifeline for spaces severely affected by the virus. Online vendors like Amazon will offer access to a network of vendors and brands to obtain applicable 3D printed factors and products from vendors located in places they can still deliver. Fab Labs, a component of the nonprofit Fab Foundation, will offer 3D printing, experimentation and prototype. The laboratories are geomapted with hospitals to respond to calls for assistance and respond to express wishes locally and urgently.
This is happening in North America and Europe: the need for non-public protective devices at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital was shared on an online network that knew the nearest Fab Lab and put the hospital in contact with it within minutes. The Saint-Fran’ois de Marange-Silvange hospital in northeastern France, one of the country’s hardest-hit regions, collaborated with a nearby Fab Lab to print 3D facial screens before the expected peak infection in France.
Periods of crisis reveal the strengths and weaknesses of our degree of preparedness and response. Reinforced 3D printing through collective intelligence responds to the global fitness call to help save lives from the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic shows that it’s time to move 3D printing beyond its use in study and prototyping labs and in the use of regimens.
The perspective of this technology, however, is as wonderful as the communities that combine around it and weave a fabric of true collaboration. The drive of collective intelligence catalyzed and made imaginable through virtual platforms will have to remain strong as long as Covid-19 is with us, remain strong after its demise and provide binding and lasting connections with the world’s formidable production resources, knowledge and knowledge. . Array Interested communities and organizations want to explore and test new designs, fabrics, and uses to combat long-lasting viruses on a giant scale.
Without collective intelligence, the support provided to health care workers, first responders, and their patients would not have been possible during this pandemic, and won’t be possible during the next one.
Frédéric Vacher is guilty of innovation and 3-dExperienceLab at Dassault Systems, where he oversees the efforts described here, adding the connection of hospitals to 3-d printers.
Coronavirus