4 Inspiring Engineering Projects During the COVID-19 Lockdown

We all know that it is impossible to open a news application or email these days without hearing about COVID-19. Unfortunately, the news is a constant stream of grim, depressing and often conflicting facts that can easily take the wind out of any readers sails if they aren’t careful. I think engineers in particular struggle because our brains want to solve problems and many of us reading this are software or hardware engineers which makes biological problem solving outside our area of expertise. This doesn’t mean that our computer engineering vs computer science can’t be applied to this crisis. In fact, as I’ve been browsing the web looking for uplifting and inspiring engineering stories, I’ve found five interesting projects that show just how creative engineers can be at solving the various challenges that we now face.

As we all know by now, ventilators are an important tool to help patients who are struggling to breath on their own. Modern ventilators are fairly sophisticated devices especially from a software standpoint, but at their heart, they are relatively simple mechanical devices. While there are several modes these devices can operate in, their end goal is to deliver a given amount of air to the patient and attempt to generate an ideal pressure and airflow curve. For a pandemic ventilator, the software required to generate these curves, measure airflow and oxygen can be done in less than 5,000 lines of code.