Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen a surge in development of Open Source Hardware, especially open source ventilators. Many of these open source ventilator projects have adopted an open-when-finished model due to legitimate legal and liability concerns. This, however, has led to a proliferation of projects with teams across the world independently designing over a hundred mutually incompatible ventilators, representing a huge amount of duplicated effort. A functioning design is necessary but not sufficient for a project to help patients. The device must be taken through regulatory approval by a manufacturer that understands why design decisions were taken. In this article we argue that the open design process developed for Open Source Software can be used for Open Source Hardware. This process not only allows remote teams to work together improving a single design, it also provides the rich history of design decisions that manufacturers need to take the device through regulatory approval.

摘要

COVID-19大流行见证了开源硬件（尤其是开源通风机）的发展。由于合法的法律和责任方面的考虑，这些开源呼吸机项目中的许多都采用了开放式完工模式。但是，这导致了项目的激增，世界各地的团队独立设计了一百多个互不兼容的呼吸机，这代表了大量重复工作。功能设计是必要的，但不足以帮助项目帮助患者。该设备必须通过制造商的监管批准，该制造商必须了解为何要做出设计决定。在本文中，我们认为为开源软件开发的开放设计过程可以用于开源硬件。