How coronavirus is changing the way we solve problems: Yahoo News Explains
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.
Video Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
JOSE GOMEZ-MARQUEZ: The MIT Little Devices Lab focuses on this mash-up of DIY and low-cost technologies and health care. When coronavirus hit, we were getting emails, what do we do? What can we print? I got a 3D printer. I got 800 printers. And a friend of mine, in an email exchange, said, you know, I think this is a "Dunkirk" moment for makers, but they don't know what to do.
I think it's very simple. Go to your local clinic. Go to your urgent care centers. Say, is there anything you need? Are you stuck with something? And it's not easy because these people are very busy, but it doesn't matter if you only make 20 masks or if you only make 20 adapters for an ear piece that is no longer made. Those 20 patients matter, you know? And sometimes we never get that chance to help those people.
There is no us and them anymore, in terms of the countries that are poor and suffering in places like here. If you go to some of these hospitals in New York City right now or in Louisiana, they're putting up the same type of tarp that a small rural hospital in Guatemala would be pulling up, you know, five years ago. And I think it's been a humbling moment. And my hope is that by having those common experiences, we can actually move forward and welcome more solutions, regardless of where they come.
Giving the people at the frontlines the tools that they need and they'll make it work has been eminently proven, not just because of the work I do. Look at the Italians with their crazy scuba masks, right? Look at the nurses in New York making PPE out of trash bags, OK? In any other context, we would have seen those solutions as subpar engineering. But the fact is, those solutions are the ones that are saving lives, you know, not whatever comes out of a design thinking workshop or something like that, you know?
I think that there is no doubt that people will recognize that nurses and doctors need tools because they will come up with ideas every day, not just in a pandemic. And there-- and not only that will they come up with ideas, they will act on those ideas without me coming in and saving the day. I think that's a new way that we're going to move forward, and I think it's going to be one of those moments like when we stopped hiring computer people to work with a doctor and we just gave the doctor the computer.
