Rapid Convergence: The Outcomes of Making PPE During a Healthcare Crisis

Abstract

The U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH) 3D Print Exchange is a public, open-source repository for 3D printable medical device designs with contributions from clinicians, expert-amateur makers, and people from industry and academia. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the NIH formed a collection to foster submissions of low-cost, locally-manufacturable personal protective equipment (PPE). We evaluated the 623 submissions in this collection to understand: what makers contributed, how they were made, who made them, and key characteristics of their designs. We found an immediate design convergence to manufacturing-focused remixes of a few initial designs affiliated with NIH partners and major for-profit groups. The NIH worked to review safe, effective designs but was overloaded by manufacturing-focused design adaptations. Our work contributes insights into: the outcomes of distributed, community-based medical making; the features that the community accepted as “safe” making; and how platforms can support regulated maker activities in high-risk domains.

Style2Fab: Functionality-Aware Segmentation for Fabricating Personalized 3D Models with Generative AI

“…Makers could supply better labels by supplying well-documented source files for their meshes, but this requires a dramatic shift in the practices of these communities. More models are shared every day and new sub-domains of making are emerging with additional labels (e.g., clinical reviews on the NIH 3D print exchange [31]). Alternatively, the creation of datasets for 3D printing [11] and the release of novel approaches to 3D model generation [19] presents an opportunity to use latent representations of 3D models to generate meta-data for functionality.…”