.
For lack of a spare part, a 69-year-old polio victim near Oklahoma City is anxious she may
die. Members of the maker community refuse to accept that — and are working together to reverse engineer the missing part.
Last week, Gizmodo told the story of three polio victims who spend hours a day in a half-century old pressure ventilators called iron lungs in order to keep breathing. For Martha Lillard, life is even more precarious – if one key component on her ancient iron lung fails, there may be no replacement available. The dated machines have been mostly replaced with more portable ventilators, so spare parts are no longer manufactured.
As Gizmodo reports, the spiral collar that seals the machinery around Lillard's neck used to cost only a few dollars, but the price rose to $200 after Philips-owned Respironics stopped making the part. Lillard says it's no longer available at all, so she attempts to maintain her remaining stock. And if the part fails? "Well, I die," she told Gizmodo.
Cue the maker community. Armed with scanners and 3D-printers, computer experts, hobbyists and hardware fiddlers are determined to fix the problem. Shenzhen-based Naomi Wu started helping to coordinate a solution through her Twitter and YouTube following of nearly 200,000 people. Reverse engineering an unseen component from a decades old device may sound complicated, but Wu is not concerned. "It should be pretty simple," she says. "Anything from the 50s and 60s, we can whip up in a makerspace, no problem."
READ NEXT
Jasmine Burton is redesigning toilets... because everybody poops
Jasmine Burton is redesigning toilets... because everybody poops
By ELEANOR PEAKE
As she puts it, once the community has a detailed drawing of the part, 3D printers and CNC machines do all the hard work. That requires getting ahold of the collar to make a copy, or taking enough measurements and photos to reverse engineer the part for rebuilding, or as one maker put it on Twitter, the collar and the textile it's made from need to be "decompiled".
The alternative is that Philips Respironics digs into its archives for its design of the collar. WIRED contacted the company to see if it could supply blueprints, but has yet to hear back.
In the meantime, Prototek OKC — the Oklahoma City makerspace community — has been trying to get in touch with Lillard. " I find it fascinating that Gizmodo wrote an article that was read by a maker in China who took initiative to find a local makerspace and see if we can help," says Prototek co-founder Matt Wilkes. "Our members have already started preliminary research to see how we can help create more parts for Ms. Lillard's machine as well as potentially find a better solution for keeping it running when power goes out."
Enjoy the warm and fuzzy feelings sparked by such a lovely collaborative effort across the internet, but also consider how the pace of health-tech innovation is changing – especially when it comes to long-term support.
Iron lungs have been phased-out since 2004, when Respironics gave patients the option to switch to a newer respirator model or stick with the iron lung knowing it may not be repairable. There are plenty of reasons Lillard and the others opted not to switch, leaving them out in the cold.
With startups and technology incumbents leaping into healthcare, what happens if a mental health app, connected pill or other smart system changes your life, but the developers go out of business, get acquired, or simply can't offer decades of support? Lillard and her cohort might be the last of the Iron Lungs, but they're unlikely to be the last getting vital healthcare support from the maker community.
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/iron-lung-maker-community
