These techies are 3D printing ventilator splitters for Covid-19 patients

At a time when there is a spurt in the number of Covid-19 cases in India, most hospitals are also running short of ventilators which are absolutely necessary to help the infected continue breathing. According to several estimates, the country has only around 50,000 ventilators for a population of around 1.3 billion people.

A Bengaluru-based deep-tech start-up, Ethereal Machines, is addressing the problem to some extent by enabling the existing ventilators to cater to the different requirements of multiple patients, depending upon their criticality. The Blume Ventures-backed firm, which specialises in technologies associated with computerised numerical control (CNC) machining and 3D printing, has come up with an innovation to augment the capacities of existing ventilators, in dire circumstances. Simple 3D printed splitters that divide the supply of oxygen into two halves have been tried out successfully in Europe.

“India is seeing a massive shortage of ventilators and manufacturing them is going to take time,” says Kaushik Mudda, co-founder and CEO of Ethereal Machines. “We need to rapidly expand ventilator capacity and ensure that in the worst of circumstances, they can be used on more than one patient, differentially.” Read More