I think it's irresponsible to not be donating our full talents as engineers to assisting those medical researchers in getting a head start on such developments. We have the ability to offload trivialities from those researchers like developing a firmware flashing process, so that they can focus on ensuring the reliable operation of such hacks.
The problem is that those talents are being used to solve totally wrong problems because of engineers going gung-ho and starting to "engineer" before they understand the subject. The problem is not lack of designs or ideas for ventilators.
This sort of hack still requires that someone makes those things at scale. That's a supply chain issue, same as taking an existing, proven and actually certified design and manufacturing it at scale. Hacking up a few CPAP machines really doesn't solve the problem when the hospitals need tens of thousands ...
Even if we ignore the legal and medical bits (only in an extreme emergency with no other options and where the alternative is an inevitable death would anyone even contemplate using something like this on a patient), this machine isn't really a ventilator suitable for people with failing lungs. Patients that have to be intubated and the machine actually breathes for them, filters, humidifies and warms the air, allows sucking of phlegm without spewing virus everywhere ... And those are the machines that are in short supply. This hack doesn't do anything from that.
And finally, it doesn't address the issue of having enough trained staff that will operate and supervise the ventilators - these things have to be supervised 24/7, sometimes for weeks. One ICU nurse is commonly supposed to handle up to 6 patients, tops. You can't just add ventilators without adding nurses, because if anything goes wrong, people will die - and where do you get those nurses from? Especially if they have to deal with a gizmo that isn't as failsafe as a real ventilator (because it wasn't meant to be)? If you need more staff to run fewer ventilators/beds, then you haven't really solved anything, have you?
And the lack of trained staff is not something a jailbreak or an Arduino can solve.
People should stop messing with building "ventilators" and focus on things where they can actually make a difference - e.g. the production of face masks, face shields and similar gear, which are in extremely short supply and don't require much sophistication to build. That would make a much bigger difference than pretending that we are somehow solving the lack of ventilators with hacked CPAP machines ...
In a scenario where people are certain to die if there is a lack of ventilators, I’m willing to take a lot of risk that they instead might die from an alternative course of treatment that doesn’t meet a normal standard of care.
If that means taking already made CPAP machines and modifying them, that’s in bounds as far as I can judge.
