D-MAVT for helpfulETH
Extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary measures. Therefore, ETH Zurich has decided to use its knowledge to fight the coronavirus. Several researchers from the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering are actively involved in projects of the helpfulETH initiative.
What started as an idea at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis is now an up and running initiative providing short-term engineering solutions for the healthcare sector in the face of COVID-19. helpfulETH was initiated by ETH Zurich and EPFL with Professor Mirko Meboldt (D-MAVT) and Professor David Atienza Alonso in the lead. The team around the initiative has been growing and now consists of over 100 committed researchers.
Production of Prusa face shields in the Makerspace
One of the project teams is producing 3D printable Prusa face shields. The shields are developed in close cooperation with testing in healthcare. „Everyone is really motivated to contribute and it is inspiring to be able to put all our knowledge to use in order to help! It can be tiring to perform monotonous tasks for several hours, like cutting identical pieces into huge numbers of shields, especially if it is not always guaranteed that they will be put to use. But it is worth it when we consider the difference we make in healthcare”, the team says.
Production is taking place in the Makerspace of the Student Project House (opened specifically for this emergency engineering). The engineers work in shifts of 4 hours. A 30-minute break in-between shifts assures that they do not run into each other. There are always two managers on-site to reassure that SGU and SPH rules are observed at all times and that everybody is safe. So far, over 2500 shields have been produced and are already put to use in hospitals.
Protective covers for phones
Another project is dedicated to helping medical staff protect their smartphones from surface contamination, as doctors and nurses rely on these devices for internal communication. Currently, the six-member team, led by Daniel Omidvarkarjan, engineer at D-MAVT’s Product Development Group, and Daniel Kirschenbaum, medical doctor at the University Hospital Zurich, focuses on devices to safely apply and remove protective covers to the phones.
«Taco and pillow»
Rotating severely ill COVID-19-patients in hospitals is a complex task usually requiring five healthcare workers. To simplify the procedure and to reduce the workload of the healthcare workers, a helpfulETH project focuses on a “taco and pillow” solution. A development team headed by Julian Ferchow, doctoral candidate at D-MAVT’s Product Development Group (pdz), ETH alumni Hanspeter Keel and Frederick Waldern, engineering alumni from pdz, worked in close cooperation with industrial partners Zühlke and Scazziga Ltd. as well as the University Hospital Zurich on an improved procedure.
Given the remote-working situation, testing the wrapping and turning of patients needed a lot of creativity. For the tests, the researchers turned the attic in a team member’s house into a temporary testing facility and obtained feedback from USZ per video. In the end, USZ and helpfulETH came up with a concept that reduces the number of medical staff from five to three for the rotation process.
“The most challenging part was to obtain the material and to organize the sterile transfer of the prototypes to USZ. All the material needed to packed and stored 48 hours prior the handover to USZ”, the team says. “However, all in all working together remotely went surprisingly well.”
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