As the coronavirus pandemic continues to push medical supply chains to their breaking point, a decentralized community of engineers, designers and DIY hobbyists — commonly known as “makers” — has stepped in to find creative ways to fill the gaps.
These are the folks retrofitting snorkeling masks into low-cost parts for ventilators, using 3D printers to produce plastic face shields for medical workers and creating at-home assembly lines for cloth face masks. They work within existing companies and academic settings or individually around the world, and Jose Gomez-Marquez, co-director of the MIT Little Devices Lab, believes that this kind of innovation could play a vital role in medical problem solving, even in a post-pandemic world.
MakerHealth, a spin-off company of the Little Devices Lab, takes that concept one step further by building an environment similar to the Little Devices Lab within the hospitals themselves. “If you’re treating respiratory patients on the seventh floor, you can hit the elevator and go to the second floor and access 3D printers, laser cutters and, more importantly, a medical materials library that allows you to do exactly what I do at MIT,” Gomez-Marquez explains.
Story continuesInstead, MakerHealth and the MIT Little Devices Lab have devised a set of modular, Lego-like reagents they call Ampli, which when assembled in a proper sequence can diagnose whether or not a patient is positive for the disease. The base of the blocks can be 3D printed with simple plastics, and the reagents that sit atop the blocks are biological compounds that can be grown from samples provided by Gomez-Marquez and his team.
“[The maker community] has amazing self-organizing capability, but at the same time we have to find a way to pierce through the noise,” he adds. “And that’s what we’re trying to do with our MakerHealth organization. We give doctors and nurses context-driven information where we don’t just 3D-print 800 things. We 3D-print the things they think matter.”
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