For several weeks I have been saying that additive manufacturing should be used to fill some of the supply chain gaps that we may be seeing in things like masks, respirators, and other consumables used in treating COVID-19. Here’s an article very much to that point on how a valve used in respirators and need to be changed out for each patient can be manufactured to order by a 3D printer:
Many have been asking what the implications of the current Covid-19 pandemic are going to be on additive manufacturing as an industry. The relationship between coronavirus and 3D printing is not entirely clear, mostly because we are very far from understanding what the long, medium and even short terms implications of the pandemic are going to be on global supply chains.
Additive manufacturing may be able to play a role in helping to support industrial supply chains that are affected by limitations on traditional production and imports. One thing is for sure though: 3D printing can have an immediate beneficial effect when the supply chain is completely broken. That was, fortunately, the case when a Northern Italian hospital needed a replacement valve for a reanimation device and the supplier had run out with no way to get more in a short time.
By now complete designs, ready to be produced on a 3D printer, should be appearing on the Internet. If intellectual property laws are interfering with that, we need to change our intellectual property laws so they’re working for us rather than against us.
If regulations prevent that, maybe we need much more agile regulatory apparatus.
The Italians have invented reanimation? Man, we’re behind the times.
Darn! PD beat me to it. Couple of those and bring on the Covid.
If there’s a buck or a Euro or a Yen to be made by being the quickest to market, someone will do the necessary work to ensure they are first. And if the product doesn’t work right they have every incentive to fix it lest they lose custom (or freedom for egregious errors).
Heard:
“You know, it’s the damndest thing, the blog commenters I know who were Constitutional scholars just a month ago are now experts in epidemiology.â€
I don’t claim to be an expert in either Constitutional law or epidemiology. But I do have commonsense and a certain native cunning.
I know. I do presume you know that wasn’t targeted at you, or anyone here. It was a quip about the social media culture.
Query- Just how unaware of the world at large is the computer geek population? We are in the middle of a never before seen pandemic with those of us in leadership positions just swamped, and the geeks decide now is the time to introduce a new communication tool they say will make things faster and better. What are the chances it fails? What are the chances we spend time we dont have on it?
Steve
They are almost complete unaware of the world at large and, honestly, not particularly interested in it. That’s one of the reasons that the user interfaces for systems are so bad. They’re written by developers for developers to suit developers rather than by developers for users to suit users.
Their interaction with the “world at large” tends to be pretty tangential.
re: “we need to change our intellectual property laws so they’re working for us rather than against us.”
The whole idea of intellectual property laws is to incentivize inventors to work for us.
Thanks Dave. You just confirmed one of my own pre-existing beliefs. Therefore it must be true!
Steve