Dyson has announced it will develop a new type of medical ventilator for NHS

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52021757

by hhs • 6 years ago

108 111 6 years ago

annadane• 6 years ago

Oh. That Dyson.

Wistar2• 6 years ago

Was not a fan until I bought their V10 vac. It is quite amazing at cleaning, performing much (much) better than any other vac I have ever owned although with the downside of an insufficient battery.

hnick3• 6 years ago

Maybe they've improved but my DC59 seems to have many design flaws.

Hair and dust gets stuck in the weirdest places, requiring a screwdriver to clean properly (or the power just cuts off due to blockages). The connection between the motorised head, tube, and the main body also seems to be insecure. Normal forward and back motion will interrupt the connection and it stops spinning. For such an expensive product, I'm not happy with the replacement parts I've had to buy for that issue.

GeekyBear2• 6 years ago

Their products are also built like a tank.

I've gotten 20 years of use out of their original upright vacuum model so far.

Ididntdothis• 6 years ago

I have a V7 and it’s excellent. Really well thought out. Feels a little like if Apple made a vacuum cleaner.

krrrh• 6 years ago

I agree. The real win is that it’s so light and convenient that you just end up vacuuming more frequently or doing spot cleaning when you notice something. It ends up being a difference in kind rather than degree.

benmarks• 6 years ago

How much does that cost? /j

But seriously, good to see so many companies stepping up to just get things done, and to see (more or less) regulations being set aside or handled speedily.

martyvis• 6 years ago

Anyone seen any info on the Dyson AirBlades used for hand-drying in public restrooms? They are very effective at drying , but flick a lot of water up and onto the unit. I guess if everyone has properly washed their hands the WHO way, the rinse water should be safe, but I'm still wondering whether you are risking getting virus from the previous possibly infected person who also doesn't know the words to Happy Birthday.

satysin• 6 years ago

I hate those god-awful AirBlade dryers. I have long fingers and it is almost impossible to dry my hands without that disgusting pool of water flicking up onto the tips of my fingers. Curl your fingers you say? Not possible due to how narrow the gap is without almost always making contact with the sides of the unit.

Terrible machines.

flir• 6 years ago

Totally agreed. Can't get my hands in and out of them without brushing the sides. It's not easy to take something terrible (a hand dryer) and make it worse.

Since this pandemic, I've just stopped using them altogether.

Polylactic_acid2• 6 years ago

They have an alternative version that solves this issue. I'm not sure if this is a successor or alt product though. https://www.dyson.com.au/hand-dryers/airblade-v.aspx

JMTQp8lwXL• 6 years ago

It is surprising this wasn't realized when the machine was being developed. Contacting the pool of water at the bottom, or the sides of the drier, seems reasonably unhygienic.

qwerty456127• 6 years ago

The world is designed for short people with short parts. Fingers are not the only problem.

sjwright3• 6 years ago

Terrible machines before the pandemic; an order of magnitude more terrible during it.

m3kw9• 6 years ago

There was a study saying it blows crap all over you. I close my eyes when ever I use it now to prevent a certain virus from getting into my eyes

toomuchtodo3• 6 years ago

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/the-bacterial-horror-of-...

Although, I imagine the liberal application of far-UVC lighting for free air antiseptic purposes in the loo might mitigate the issue to an extent.

monocasa• 6 years ago

Pretty much all hand dryers spread microbes like you wouldn't believe. I've taken to just letting my hands air dry, but I'm in a very dry climate where that happens very quickly.

et-al• 6 years ago

Dyson makes a $1500 integrated faucet that incorporates a hand-dryer.

https://www.dyson.com/hand-dryers/dyson-airblade-wash-dry-ov...

Somehow none of the geniuses in the design world have criticised that the 331mph Air Blade dryer, when pointed at a concave surface, i.e. the sink, would spit things right back in the opposite direction.

I've used this faucet/dryer while transiting through Reykjavik and you can see the remaining soap lather blown from the sink drain up over the counter and onto my shirt (and everywhere else).

It's an expensively flawed idea.

roywiggins3• 6 years ago

I too was first introduced to those things flying through Reykjavik, and since then I've met them in a few office bathrooms.

They are the absolute worst. How anyone thought it was a good idea is beyond me.

icebraining• 6 years ago

Same here, in an office in Amsterdam. The sink hadn't fully drained when I moved my hand beneath the sensor inadvertently. Result: soapy water everywhere, including the floor and my clothes.

Brakenshire• 6 years ago

I hope that one of the outcomes of this crisis is we take a proper evidence-led approach towards building and design standards to reduce the spread of infectious disease.

For all new buildings or products, any surface which is touched by hundreds of people each day needs to be redesigned to be contactless or to use materials that minimize transmission; products like hand dryers should pass standards that measure whether they spread bacteria or viruses; buildings and public transportation (buses, trains and planes) need to use HEPA filters to reduce airborne transmission risks, and to filter out air pollution; and sinks for hand washing need to become a standard feature at office receptions or entrances/exits.

We should also be able to reduce the normally accepted steady state of deaths, ill health and economic impacts from flu and other unnecessary sickness.

But this is going to be more and more necessary as global disease transmission becomes easier. It could be a new strain of flu or a drug resistant TB next year. There has to be defence in depth and in advance, not just hoping always for a magic fix after the problem has occurred.

hinkley2• 6 years ago

Someone needs to socialize the idea that patina on bronze, brass and silver is a good thing. Frankly I'm a little surprised the hipsters didn't latch onto it right from the beginning.

It turns out that copper can not only kill bacteria but also degrades naked dna/rna strands, preventing gene transfer between species. Problem is, the last time we were still using brass a lot, it was all lacquered in plastic.

hinkley2• 6 years ago

There's a one-sided version I saw recently (internet says the Airblade V), which seems to be less of a game of Operation and actually mostly seemed to work.

But to your point, the intake vents are mounted very low on the side, and I think I'd feel a lot better about recirculation if the intakes were farther above the outlets.

jacquesm• 6 years ago

There is a very dark joke in here somewhere given how well Dyson airblades spread bacteria and other crap around.

762236• 6 years ago

I submitted a support question to them about the safety of their airblades, and they never responded.

wbl3• 6 years ago

Why can't they copy the old Bird ventilator or similar?

arcticbull10• 6 years ago

Some industry insiders have suggested that Dyson's approach to create a new model will take too long.

You don't say. You can't just turn a vacuum cleaner into a ventilator by setting it to Blow instead of Suck. Medical devices take a very long time to develop, certify, build, release and develop training for because they're medical devices. The rule of thumb for consumer-grade hardware is it takes a minimum of one year from ideation to first delivery.

You want new ones fast, you get the manufacturers who make existing ones make more of them. The problem isn't that we're out of ventilator designs, it's that we're out of physical ventilators.

This feels like Elon's child-rescue submarine, and at least as far as COVID-19 it's likely to save exactly the same number of people.

cbhl• 6 years ago

I was under the impression that the NHS had been sourcing ventilators from a French manufacturer, but France decided to nationalize that manufacturer and stop exports.

Although I do wonder how much of a home-built solution will be "designed" versus, say "jury-rigged".

freepor4• 6 years ago

When you need more than the existing manufacturers can produce, and the alternative (Italy) is to let them die in a hallway, then you might be willing to try anything. If it was my life I’d prefer the Dyson over nothing.

7thaccount2• 6 years ago

Yes. This. Incredibly desperate times here.

roywiggins3• 6 years ago

Well, you might have nothing anyway, if it takes twice as long for Dyson to produce anything by starting from scratch rather than using an existing design.

I guess nobody should stop him trying to make some of these at a crash pace, because there's a nonzero chance they might work out, but it does seem unlikely.

djsjejjdi324• 6 years ago

That would be Spain, not Italy.

arcticbull10• 6 years ago

So take the design from one existing company and ramp the manufacture. The alternative isn't sit down with a blank sheet of paper and some pencils and see what you can knock out in a couple of weeks and shove into people without going through the appropriate testing and certification procedures.

The problem isn't a lack of ventilator designs.

travisporter• 6 years ago

Dyson said it had been working with The Technology Partnership, a medical company based in Cambridge, to develop a "meaningful and timely response".

Maybe a new design can be built faster if it’s from the ground up. This can happen concurrently with ramping up existing manufacturing of vents.

flatiron• 6 years ago

Reinvent the ventilator and have one sitting in a hospital in 14 days with no teething issues on production, training, deployment, maintenance?

dheera• 6 years ago

The child rescue submarine was not used for the rescue, but it wasn't a bad thing that it could have served as a backup plan.

Elon Musk's comments were unforgivable, though.

roywiggins3• 6 years ago

The descriptions I've read of the cave suggest that it wouldn't have worked as a backup anyway- a human can wriggle or be pulled through, but a pod large enough to hold a human would be too big and inflexible. It would have snagged on something, and then what?

erikpukinskis3• 6 years ago

What comments?

tcbawo2• 6 years ago

There is a growing consensus that constant positive pressure is what many patients need: https://emcrit.org/ibcc/covid19/

Developing a closed mask that doesn't contaminate everyone around them might do much good.

ipsum22• 6 years ago

So essentially a CPAP machine.

glenneroo• 6 years ago

This feels like Elon's child-rescue submarine, and at least as far as COVID-19 it's likely to save exactly the same number of people.

Speaking of Elon Musk, his initial plans from a few days ago to also produce some in-house has morphed into the saner goal of acquiring 1000+ units from China, which apparently have already arrived in LA: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-24/californi...

brenden2• 6 years ago

Elon probably just went on Alibaba and bought some with his credit card.

ineedasername6• 6 years ago

Although buying existing ones is zero-sum: assuming the worldwide demand exceeds supply and, as such, those ventilators would have been sold anyway, his buying of those ventilators just swapped the shortage problem to a different group of patients.

djtriptych2• 6 years ago

This doesn't even pass the sniff test. If Dyson can produce an 80% effective version they obviously should.

arcticbull10• 6 years ago

No, they shouldn't because an 80% effective ventilator might kill someone when a company that knows how to make ventilators could just produce a 100% effective one.

robomartin3• 6 years ago

I have to say, one of the things that is driving me mad these days is the level of ignorance evidenced by both popular and media conversations about all of this stuff.

I mean, are we watching too many science fiction movies?

Have we lost any connection to what it actually takes to make things?

With over thirty years in technology and manufacturing I would not touch the rapid development of a ventilator with a ten foot pole. As you correctly state, designing such devices takes years. And, beyond that, it takes decades of accumulated experience to inform the decisions and choices made during the design of any modern device. And then there's the years of testing, qualification and supply chain engineering.

No, the only way to make ventilators is to make more of an already proven design under the supervision of the companies already making them. In other words, expand their production capacity by retooling already capable manufacturing environments.

Watching the White House press briefings I can't help but feel that reporters must think Trump is Captain Picard who, armed with advanced replicators, can replicate mass quantities of anything within days. Oh, yes, and he must be Superman too.

In real life things take time. And if your industrial base has been almost completely off-shored, it takes even longer. If it's even possible at all.

MikeAmelung2• 6 years ago

I'm right there with you, probably has to do with many of them having never seen a manufacturing facility. But they do know how to write "Those jobs are never coming back!"

cityzen• 6 years ago

Only $600 per mask!

nodesocket• 6 years ago

I heard on a major news outlet, "...why are private companies such as Tesla and Elon Musk able to provide ventilators faster than the US government?"

This should be obvious, private companies don't have red-tape, private companies for the most part have better talent, and private companies work at a much higher throughput and level of efficiency. I've stated all along the solutions to this crisis are going to come from US companies for the most part, not from government (excluding capital stimulus). For this reason, we should all be supporting a fiscal package that stimulates business and corporations to get out of this.

erikpukinskis3• 6 years ago

What do you think red tape is?

And why do you think it applies to government workers but not private workers?

olivermarks• 6 years ago

Unfortunately I think Dyson is a blowhard (sorry about pun) and self promoter. This hack of a Decathlon Scuba mask is the sort of thing these manufacturers should be presenting to the world rather than their endless brand promotion. https://www.isinnova.it/easy-covid19-eng/

DrNuke• 6 years ago

Lol... just copycat the fastest and cheapest approved model for the high numbers you need? Dyson doing a Dyson is soooo smug or exceptionalist again. Sigh

dguaraglia2• 6 years ago

To be fair, a lot of these companies trying to switch manufacturing to help with the COVID-19 epidemic are hamstrung by the same intellectual and copyright laws they normally would.

The only two sane approaches would be that copyright owners provide temporary, free licenses to other manufacturers (heck, even make the government pay a royalty for each unit) or the government to force the companies to provide the designs.

Neither option would be favored by either UK or US right now, because the cult of free enterprise is more important than human loss.

tim333• 6 years ago

Boris could just say they are not going to enforce copyright etc during the crisis.

ElijahLynn• 6 years ago

This title is misleading, first line of article says: "Dyson has announced it will develop a new type of medical ventilator".

"WILL DEVELOP", NOT "DEVELOPS".

brigandish• 6 years ago

I'm reading the comments and people are questioning the ability to get them done in 14 days or whichever absurdly short space of time you'd want to pick.

There is no evidence this pandemic will be over at any time in the near or long term future, just a thus far folorn hope. For all we know it will persist for a couple of waves of death, then as a mutation, year on year. The fragility of our health systems has been exposed and the ability of manufacturers to ramp up production, or even share designs[0] so they can be fixed in the meantime, has also been show to be lacking so some competition in the space to

a) produce more ventilators

b) hopefully produce better ventilators

c) make them cheaper

cannot be a bad thing. The chances of having an antiviral or vaccine before Dyson completes a viable ventilator are also pie in the sky, so pick your horse and back it, it's all going to be too late for too many.

[0] Italians Found Way to 3-D Print Key Ventilator Piece for $1 to Help Battle Coronavirus—So the Company With the Patent Is Threatening to Sue https://citizentruth.org/italians-found-way-to-3-d-print-key...

ineedasername6• 6 years ago

Why would it be easier/faster for a company to make their own design than for existing manufacturers to scale up production? Wouldn't it make more sense to throw resources at scaling existing production than new designs which would, themselves, then need to have production scaled up anyway?

GeekyBear2• 6 years ago

I've mentioned it before, but there is already an American company that makes a simplified and hardened version of a ventilator that is aimed at meeting surge demand during a pandemic.

http://www.alliedhpi.com/mcv.htm

They have already gone through the regulatory approval process and the cheapest model was retailing at about $3,000 and not the $50,000 number Ive seen tossed about for models with all the modern bells and whistles.

When you need to ramp up production quickly, simpler is better.

ineedasername6• 6 years ago

Reading that page I'm actually astounded we don't have 100,000 of them stockpiled around the country.

Cantbekhan• 6 years ago

And I suppose it "doesn't lose breathing" ? Sorry I had to ...

Glench• 6 years ago

Once this pandemic is past, I hope industries will retool the same way in developing decarbonizing technologies.

jerome-jh• 6 years ago

Hoping it is not as loud as their vacuum cleaners, hand dryers ;)

Dyson has announced it will develop a new type of medical ventilator for NHS

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