WORLD— Ferrari has released images and more information on the ventilator the company has produced to help fight COVID-19 as of May 13.
Ferrari joined forces with the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in order to build a ventilator all from scratch in just five weeks to help coronavirus patients. IIT asked Ferrari to help with producing ventilators in order to lessen the work on the Italian health service from the beginning of the pandemic.
The name of the ventilator is FI5, initials that take after Ferrari, IIT, and the amount of time it takes to produce. The design of the ventilator has been released by the automobile company on their website so that anyone can produce on their own. Ferrari stated,
“FI5 has been designed to meet the typical demands of medium intensive care; reliable, versatile, easy to use and assemble, able to optimise oxygen consumption and being produced in volume, using easily available materials, so as to have a far lower cost than currently available pulmonary ventilators. The technical specification of FI5, the drawings, the firmware, software and list of components are now available as an open source project, which means anyone can produce it. In fact, some Italian, Mexican and United States companies have already contacted Ferrari and IIT to move on to certifying and distributing the product. IIT, through connections to all European research centres, will put the project on the DIH-HERO network, used for robotic technologies in health care.”
The first prototype of FI5 was assembled last week at IIT headquarters in Genoa and underwent many functionality tests, which passed with ease.
