Dr. Stephen Richardson, Doctor of Anesthesiology at the University of Minnesota, and his team showing the new ventilator in action.

This ventilator is nearing a production-ready state in only 1 week. How important is this speed? Yesterday, the NY Times reported:

“In a startlingly quick ascent, officials reported Friday that [NYC] was closing in on 8,000 positive tests... 10 times higher than reported earlier in the week. In the Bronx, doctors at Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center say they have only a few remaining ventilators for patients who need them to breathe… Officials have said the state...could be short as many as 25,000 ventilators… Generally, about 20% of coronavirus patients require hospitalization, with about one-quarter of those needing to be put on a mechanical ventilator machine to help them breathe.”

That’s a shortage of 25,000 (!) ventilators in New York State alone.

Dr. Richardson acknowledges, "This is not a ventilator that anyone would choose if they had a high-end alternative, but it could be a backup, or its plans could be distributed online so hospitals could build their own."

These ventilators are designed to be used under very specific circumstances, i.e., where bag-valve mask (BVM) ventilation is not contraindicated and where trained medical staff can supervise the machine. If BVM is the only available option due to a shortage of more sophisticated ventilators, this will be an option. Human-administered BVM ventilation is not going to be possible with the expected volume of patients, and with the possible need to ventilate them 24/7 for days.

Premium ventilators cost upwards of $25,000, but this device will cost less than $1,000 in volume. More important, production of these ventilators can be quickly scaled up into the thousands; it will be impossible to scale production of premium ventilators as fast as needed. You won't be able to buy premium ventilators at ANY price.


We want to applaud the University of Minnesota, Dr. Richardson, Aaron Tucker of the University Bakken MDC, MGC Diagnostics, Protolabs, and Digi-Key for all of their hard work and dedication to this project over the past week. Teknic is proud and honored to have played a small role.

If you want to contribute to the design or leverage the design to create another, Teknic has published all of the design files for a recent revision on Reddit here (open-source):   / easily_manufactured_open_source_lowcost