Intubation Chamber

Purpose

Intubation is a particularly risky procedure for healthcare practitioners. Intubation is the process of inserting a breathing tube that connects to a ventilator to provide forced air into a patient. There is a very high risk of virus laden droplets contaminating the practitioner during this process.

An intubation box is a simple, mechanical barrier to protect practitioners against droplets. It’s much less effective against aerosols, and is considered a last line of defense, or additional protection to help increase the life of N95 masks.

Rapid Response

The request from Sam Haynor came in around 1pm on Friday. By 5pm, i’d designed a highly parametric model and cnc’d the first version. Within 24 hours, we can demonstrated this v1 to the head of the San Francisco General Hospital ER.

A lot of the success Something Labs had was to do with this quick iteration and access to medical professionals who would be able to vet our designs and give feedback for improvements.

Features

1. Fast machine time. Cut takes around 30 minutes per box. Two boxes fit onto a standard sheet of 4ft x 8ft polycarbonate.

2. No assembly hardware needed. Optional Pins remove the possibility of the box being disassembled accidentally.

3. Interchangeable front panels. Our recommended front panel is the flexible vinyl, because it crease a better seal around the hands, while still allowing a fair amount of flexibility. For doomsday scenarios, a rigid front panel with

As we worked with various local hospitals, we evolved the design and created perhaps 8 different prototypes.

Something Labs

In response the lack of PPE for protection against Covid 19, a few of us from the Exploratorium got together to address the issue. This turned into a small non-profit called Something Labs.

https://www.somethinglabs.org/

The intubation box was the second thing i worked on for Something Labs.