Responding to crisis

In March of 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic was ravaging my home state of Washington, with Seattle being a major epicenter of the initial US outbreak. The resulting PPE shortage left many clinics, testing labs, and emergency response units operating with minimal protection from the virus, to say nothing of the countless essential workers and regular people who were not prioritized for PPE distribution. Being recently sent home from college, several my friends and I decided that we could put our engineering skills to use by designing and distributing 3D printed PPE to our community. Through the RPrime Foundation, a Seattle based philanthropic organization, we launched the Maker Mask, a 3D printed respirator designed to use N95 filter material cut from vacuum bags. After receiving a strong initial response to the design, we applied for and received Emergency Use Approval from the National Institute of Health. We also received an endorsement from Dr. Xuan Qin, a professor of laboratory medicine at the University of Washington and clinical microbiologist at the Seattle Children’s Hospital, and eventually patented our design.  

Geek Wire Article with Dr. Qin’s endorsement

The original Maker Mask prototype was made from ~15 3D printed components.

Head of Manufacturing

To produce the Maker Mask and meet the demand from our community we launched a “small batch production plant”, which I personally managed as Head of Manufacturing. This involved aggregating over 40 3D printers, lent to us by local schools, and establishing a small facility at our church. My team and I worked to optimize the manufacturing & assembly process of the Maker Mask, develop quality control and testing documentation, and create production cadencing, machine maintenance scheduling, and efficiency tracking schemes. These optimization efforts significantly improved our manufacturing volume, allowing our plant to at its peak produce over 1000 QA validated units for donation in a 3-month period.

To help as many people as possible, we decided to make the 3D print files available for free, launching the Maker Mask website and putting out a call to hobbyists to produce and distribute the respirators in their communities. The campaign to spread localized production ended up being a massive success, with our site receiving over 866,000 views from users across 160 countries and the respirator files being downloaded by over 250,000 individuals.

Maker Mask website

My team also worked to improve the Maker Mask, designing and testing several prototype versions and integrating them into production. As part of our Maker Mask platform, I was involved in hosting informational webinars on these new versions, assembly instructions, and 3D printing tips for our maker community.

To better organize our maker community, my team and I created documentation so that others could replicate our “small batch production plant” as well. This included information on how to set up and manage these facilities, as well as distribution of copies of the production tracking & optimization systems we had created. Before long we had established our first “satellite site” at a local high school. Working closely with the school’s staff, I helped stand up their operation and integrate them into our production tracking and distribution system. Several members of our maker community who only had access to 3D printing equipment on an individual scale were also connected with our central production & distribution system. These individual makers would produce components and send them to us in Seattle for QA testing, assembly, and distribution.

We soon realized that even these coordinated efforts could not produce the quantity of respirators required because of the limited scale nature of 3D printing and began adapting the design to be manufacturable via injection molding. This effort resulted in the final Maker Mask Radius, injection molded out of silicone and HDPE, with a successful initial manufacturing run of 5000 units.

Going beyond the Maker Mask

As the acute need for PPE in the US began to diminish, we turned our attention to other ways of helping address the pandemic. One of our major projects in this space were the development of a low cost, easily serviceable ventilator for use in field clinics in parts of the world without access to expensive ventilators or reliable maintenance. For this project myself and our chief engineer worked to convert a DC motor taken from a hoverboard into the driver for an Ambu bag. The system was designed to provide consistent airflow to the patient and with adjustable flowrate & input pressure, as well as the option for supplemental oxygen. This involved firmware programming in Arduino, design and selection the ventilator’s chipset, 3D printing of its mechanical components, and cost & logistics analysis. Though we produced two working prototypes, we ultimately decided that raising the capital to scale the project and forming the partnership needed to deploy the ventilator to overseas locations would be prohibitively difficult for our small organization. None the less, it was a fantastic and fun design experience design and a good, hands-on case study in trying to bring a product to market

At around the same time as we were working on the ventilator, we were approached by Dr. Douglas Backous, an Ear Nose & Throat otolaryngologist affiliated with Seattle’s Swedish Medical Center. He explained that surgeons performing sinus surgery had significantly higher rates of covid infection than their peers, and that this was largely because there existed no good way to contain particulate from the patient during these procedures. Dr. Backous explained that while covid may eventually fade away, it revealed a need for a paradigm shift in this space. Never again would it be sufficient to just protect the patient from the world, going forward the world also needed to be protected from the patient. Working closely with Dr. Backous, we developed a version of our Maker Mask Radius that is suitable for containment of particulate during laparoscopic surgery. Production of 2000 units of the initial prototype is currently underway, with field trails set to start in 2022 and a patent pending.