Role of additive manufacturing in medical application COVID-19 scenario: India case study

162

Since the late 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has been spread all around the world. The pandemic is a critical challenge to the health and safety of the general public, the medical staff and the medical systems worldwide. It has been globally proposed to utilise robots during the pandemic, to improve the treatment of patients and leverage the load of the medical system. However, there is still a lack of detailed and systematic review of the robotic research for the pandemic, from the technologies’ perspective. Thus a thorough literature survey is conducted in this research and more than 280 publications have been reviewed, with the focus on robotics during the pandemic. The main contribution of this literature survey is to answer two research questions, i.e. 1) what the main research contributions are to combat the pandemic from the robotic technologies’ perspective, and 2) what the promising supporting technologies are needed during and after the pandemic to help and guide future robotics research. The current achievements of robotic technologies are reviewed and discussed in different categories, followed by the identification of the representative work’s technology readiness level. The future research trends and essential technologies are then highlighted, including artificial intelligence, 5 G, big data, wireless sensor network, and human-robot collaboration.

Section: Robots In Covid-19mentioning

confidence: 99%

A literature survey of the robotic technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic

Wang

2021

162

“…3D-printing as a fast response production method was used very successfully during the pandemic. Digital production files can be made open source and shared to enable rapid global production by communities, individuals, universities, corporations and government [ 42 ].…”

Section: Sprint To the Minimum Viable Product And Upscaling Productiomentioning

confidence: 99%

Case study into the successful emergency production and certification of a filtering facepiece respirator for Belgian hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic

Vanhooydonck

Goethem

Loon

et al. 2021

“…Very recently, Patel and Gohil [137] studied the role of additive manufacturing in COVID-19 scenario from Indian landscape. Therein, they clearly demonstrated that government agencies, individuals, corporations and universities have been working together to quickly develop various 3D-printed products especially when established supply chains are under distress in India.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Additive manufacturing and the COVID-19 challenges: An in-depth study

Tareq

Rahman

Hossain

et al. 2021

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) rapidly achieved global pandemic status. The pandemic created huge demand for relevant medical and personal protective equipment (PPE) and put unprecedented pressure on the healthcare system within a very short span of time. Moreover, the supply chain system faced extreme disruption as a result of the frequent and severe lockdowns across the globe. In such a situation, additive manufacturing (AM) becomes a supplementary manufacturing process to meet the explosive demands and to ease the health disaster worldwide. Providing the extensive design customization, a rapid manufacturing route, eliminating lengthy assembly lines and ensuring low manufacturing lead times, the AM route could plug the immediate supply chain gap, whilst mass production routes restarted again. The AM community joined the fight against COVID-19 by producing components for medical equipment such as ventilators, nasopharyngeal swabs and PPE such as face masks and face shields. The aim of this article is to systematically summarize and to critically analyze all major efforts put forward by the AM industry, academics, researchers, users, and individuals. A step-by-step account is given summarizing all major additively manufactured products that were designed, invented, used, and produced during the pandemic in addition to highlighting some of the potential challenges. Such a review will become a historical document for the future as well as a stimulus for the next generation AM community.