News

Image: www.bag.admin.ch

Yesterday on the 30th of September us helpfulETH volunteers had our final official get-together, to debrief, share some moments of reminiscing and round off the initiative that we started. As we have mentioned in previous news posts, our “Hibernation Team” is still running low key operations, for anyone who still has a need for our solutions or, which we of course do not hope for, our help should be needed again.

The common themes of yesterday’s get-together were without a doubt “rewarding experience”, “teamwork”, “learning”, and “making a difference”. Below are two final word clouds that we created.

With this, we say thank you for now.

Do not hesitate to contact us at helpfuleth@ethz.ch at anytime! We look forward to hearing from you!

The 3D Pioneers Challenge has published the finalists of the international design competition for additive manufacturing technologies on their homepage. More than 50 finalists made it onto the shortlist in the multi-stage jury process and helpfulETH’s PACID system for communication in infectious environments is one of them!

Head over to 3D Pioneers Challenge’s Homepage to read more about them!

With the extraordinary situation in Switzerland ending and almost all restrictions lifted, we at helpfulETH are also moving into a new phase. Most of our volunteers returned to their work outside of helpfulETH, yet a small team remains to coordinate the shipping of already manufactured solutions. This team will also continuously monitor the situation and, in case there is a need for our help, reactivate helpfulETH. Indicators that trigger such a reactivation include, but are not limited to, the government anew upgrading the situation status in terms of the Epidemics Act to extraordinary, or a high influx of support requests from the healthcare sector.

To the 150+ scientists, engineers, students, or industry professionals who investigated issues, designed products, 3D-printed prototypes, offered their expertise, or gave us access to their factories: Thank you for your hard work and dedication during this extraordinary time. This initiative would not have been possible without you.

For any questions, please contact helpful@ethz.ch

“Special times require special measures” – read more about helpfulETH on D-MAVT’s homepage!

Head over to the ETH Ambassadors Blog to read about how we learn and work together during times like these. A new post about helpfulETH!

Head on over to D-MAVT’s Instagram to find their latest post on helpfulETH!

Our project focused on relieving the prone position is bringing out results to USZ and has documented their findings in a publication and a new video.

Hospitals treating COVID-19 patients around the world are using the prone-positioning of patients with Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) as an effective therapy to increase blood oxygenation and reduce mortality. Turning anaesthetized patients safely requires at least 3-5 medical nurses and can be tedious to do with current methods. helpfulETH’s project proposes a simple mechanical solution to facilitate the proning procedure and reduce the amount of personnel needed.

The Proning Taco consists of two parts that are wrapped around the patient before turning, the bottom of which remains under the patient during the “parking” period. A functional model was created for preliminary testing by the University Hospital of Zurich (USZ). The tests concluded that while the system has the potential to facilitate rotation, particularly for heavier patients, issues with axial stability during rotation need to be overcome to present a safe and viable product. The blueprints for the design along with detailed test results are entered into the public domain for independent future development.

See the video below to learn more, or read the full publication here!

https://youtu.be/SjFxbbEMM2Y

The first solutions of helpfulETH are already in use in several hospitals throughout Switzerland. Below is the flyer which we distribute to a wide range of healthcare providers in order to inform them about the possibility to obtain our devices.

Shortly, we will have a “Results” section on our homepage, where requests for our solutions can be made!

Above, you can download our flyer and share it with healthcare providers who can benefit from our solutions! The flyer is available in 4 languages, however the main language of our homepage is English.

In today’s NZZ, Joël Mesot (President of ETH Zürich), Martin Vetterli (President of EPF Lausanne), and Michael Hengartner (President of the ETH Board) comment on cooperation in times of Corona and reflect on the coming together of the scientific community. helpfulETH finds itself in there too!

The article is in German.

Although some of us are inevitably on the workshop floors and in the hospitals for manufacturing and testing, you find the post under #mavtathome – very fittingly according to the circumstances!

Today, SRF broadcasted a short segment on helpfulETH with Stephan Fox as guest.

Happy Easter from the “engineering frontline” against COVID-19!

While the Easter bunny is working hard, so are we! Corona unforntunately takes no Easter holidays.

Our project teams continue to work diligently and have come a long way.

While our mission is to create quickly implementable solutions for healthcare, helpfulETH also relies strongly on our healthcare partners for testing and evaluation – this is of essential importance to assure usability!

Physicians are giving generously of their scarce time to support our project teams with expert know-how and testing for fast implementation. This has proven very successful – our first products are used in hospitals already and others are being tested as we write.

Seeing that the reception in hospitals is one of great appreciation among burdened healthcare personnel only inspires us to work even harder!

The above are a few excerpts from some of our current projects – just like us, we hope that you are proud and happy to witness the diversity of projects that we are working on, thanks to the far-ranging skill set of our volunteers!

With that, we return to the workbench and wish you all a happy and healthy Easter!

Today our initiative “helpfulETH” is officially launched. We already have a whole bunch of projects up and running, some of which are rolling out solutions to hospitals very soon.

To read the article, check out the ETH News page (German).
Here for English.

More than 800 face shields have been produced by now! To think helpfulETH only started 3 weeks ago…!

After a bit more than two weeks in existence, helpfulETH grew a lot and we already have multiple ongoing projects. To celebrate this and get to know each other a bit better, we had our first (virtual) town hall meeting this Thursday.

We are so happy to see how quickly our initiative is growing and how many we have become! We feel that, in order to keep everybody in the loop, we would like to start giving brief daily updates with insights from the projects and from the organization team.

We are thrilled to have the first projects started and more to come. The project teams consist of students, PhDs, lecturers, and industry partners. Meanwhile, we build up our production capacity – the first parts have already been printed!

In the background, we build up a network of legal and regulatory people, external manufacturers, coaches, specialists, and medical experts. In addition, we take care that we find funding possibilities for every project.
Happy to have you all aboard, stay tuned for the next projects to come and take care.

Your helpfulETH team