With the advent of the coronavirus pandemic and the shortage of ventilators, one Israeli nonprofit hoping to ameliorate the situation is AmboVent, which provides blueprints to build makeshift ventilators for as little as $500.
With boyish looks and long hair, paramedic Yuval Eran looks like he should be enjoying a post-army trek in the Himalayas rather than facilitating a team of AmboVent volunteers from Israel’s military, medical and high-tech sectors.
At 15, Eran began volunteering with Magen David Adom’s emergency services and FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science), a global robotics community that inspires young people to study STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). He credits the two with shaping who is today.
FIRST is very popular in Israel, with around 16,000 high school students involved. “My work in FIRST prepared me for the coronavirus challenge,” Eran said, adding that FIRST’s annual robotics competition, in which teams are given seven weeks to manufacture a robot, took on real-life stakes when the virus broke out in Israel.
“Suddenly we had to find cheap solutions. And even though there was no seven week deadline, there was a real deadline. We were in a race against time because people were actually dying.”
Eran and other volunteers worked around the clock and within 10 days had a finished prototype. Three days after that, the team uploaded the open source design to the internet. Within the hour, the blueprint had been downloaded 19,000 times. Eran said he hadn’t experienced such a feeling of unity since the 2014 Gaza conflict. “This is the beautiful face of Israel,” he said, “when Israelis drop everything and fight tooth and nail to get my number just to ask me how they can help.”
The device uses easy-to-find components such as windshield wipers. Other parts can be 3-D printed straight from the design itself. Using a robotic arm to operate a bag-valve mask, like the kind used in ambulances, the device is connected to the patient through an intubation tube. Standard ventilators cost around $40,000 so AmboVent’s solution has been a literal lifesaver for poorer regions.
“We knew we needed to find a solution very, very quickly that other people around the world can adopt and develop,” Eran said. “It was for the greater good. At no point did anyone think about making a profit.”
According to Eran, there are around 300 active teams around the world working on building AmboVents. He liaises with them on a daily basis. “There’s a lot of programming and mechanics involved,” he said. “It’s not like building a table from IKEA.”
One team from Guatemala told Eran that they had given up the search for ventilators after being turned away from every country. “They told me they felt that the whole world had abandoned them but only Israel was a ray of light helping them. It’s very, very moving for me to hear that,” he said, “and gives me strength to keep going on even though I haven’t slept in two months.”
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that there are 50,000 high school students involved in FIRST.
