Engineers Fight Covid-19

Dear Editor,

I am writing this letter so that everyone knows it’s not just doctors but also engineers that are stopping COVID-19. The inventions of engineers have kept COVID-19 patients and medical staff alive. Engineers are designing and improving ventilators, helping people wear PPE, creating an app for improving communication, and making robots that help with social distancing.

Since COVID-19 is a respiratory-based infection, it has a strong impact on the lungs. By putting ventilators on the patients who have the breathing infection, it will spread oxygen all around the body so the patient can live. However, putting a patient on a ventilator is invasive. So, engineers started making new devices for hospitals. For example, engineers from University College London Hospital in the United Kingdom and engineers at Mercedes Formula 1 worked together to create a Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) device that is less invasive than normal ventilators because doctors don’t have to put tubes into their patient’s skin or mouth. By making the CPAP, engineers are contributing to society in a good way, helping patients who have COVID-19 have less pain.

Engineers are also making inventions that can help people who need to wear PPE. PPE stands for personal protective equipment and includes masks, gloves, and gowns. Medical staff and patients need to wear the equipment so that they don’t spread the virus to each other. Because they must wear PPE for a long time, they can get hot really fast due to heat stress. An engineer solved the problem by making a cooling pack that can be put inside PPE to cool down the body temperature to make wearing PPE easier.

You know how you also can’t hear people so well when they are wearing PPE like face masks? Well, an engineer at a company called 42 Technology created a free speech-to-text app that allows people to speak into their device and the app translates their message to the person they want to text in real- time. It’s helpful to people who are wearing masks because this way they don’t have to take their mask off to communicate and risk giving others COVID-19. If patients are hearing and/or speech impaired, then they can go in the app to text the medical staff to inform them of any problems. This solution shows that the engineers improved communication between the patients and medical staff, and they are respecting and finding solutions for people with disabilities whose needs are often underrepresented.

During this pandemic, staying a safe distance away from people is an important thing to do to prevent the spread of the virus. With this issue in mind, an engineer in China has developed a robot capable of treating and testing COVID-19 patients. The robot has a remote-control that the doctors can use to do surgery while they stand a safe distance away from the patient. The robot can perform many of the jobs that healthcare workers do. Some of the things the robot can do is take mouth swabs, perform ultrasound scans, and listen to organs with a specialized stethoscope. It can even disinfect itself after doing a surgery.

There are lots of ways engineers can help stop the spread of COVID-19. As shown, engineers are designing and improving ventilators to reduce pain, finding ways to improve wearing PPE, developing an app that communicates messages between patients and medical staff to serve underrepresented communities, and creating robots that do surgery so that medical staff can stay socially distanced.

Thanks to the focus and passion of engineers, we will find a way to beat COVID-19 at its own game.