As part of our role to play in the pandemic, we were proud sponsors of the CoVent-19 challenge alongside companies such as Ximedica, Stratasys, Onshape and GrabCAD. The aim of the challenge was to create life-saving equipment in an open-source, crowdsourced, highly affordable, and royalty-free manner, challenging the normal status quo innovation of medical devices.
As part of our efforts, we provided our software to teams alongside our support and expertise in the areas of concurrent and agile engineering processes.
Teams were either newly formed for this challenge or more established medical device practitioners, combining experienced engineers, medical practitioners, students and friends from a wide variety of industries such as aerospace, automotive, medical and others.
The challenge attracted over 200 entries from 43 countries and the amazing work was narrowed down to 7 finalist designs. It must be remembered that not only were these projects able to deliver working prototypes in an incredibly short period of time but also do so whilst working remotely and often with limited previous experience in the field of ventilators.
We want to congratulate all participants for their involvement and drive to put in use their skills, experience and motivations for this cause, and especially to the winning teams SmithVent, VOX (previously InVent), and RespiraWorks for excelling in their mission.
We look forward to using this challenge as a launchpad to not only continue but deepen our commitment to empowering engineers to develop amazing hardware that caters to the demands of the time.
If you or your team are developing innovative medical hardware or want to play a role in the Fight against COVID-19 please get in touch!
Send us an email to contact-us@valispace.com or engineering-taskforce@valispace.com.