The pandemic continues to sweep across the world, straining healthcare . The need for essential tools like ventilators is greater than ever. To help with that, tech companies are turning to alternative designs to create faster and more affordable ventilators. And now the Raspberry Pi has become one of the key components that will help in this effort. As Tom's Hardware, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is ramping up production of its Pi Zero boards to provide manufacturers with enough units to keep up with the high demand for ventilators. Although the $5 Pi Zero is the company's least powerful computer (it has a single-core, 1.0 GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM), it still has enough power to handle the relatively simple computational tasks that a ventilator requires.
Another reason why Raspberry Pi is ideal for ventilators is the company’s ability to quickly source them. Eben Upton, CEO and Founder of Raspberry Pi, told Tom’s Hardware that, “Raspberry Pi is built to order, not to order, so we generally have products either in stock or in the pipeline with short lead times.” The company built 192,000 Pi Zero and Pi Zero W boards in the first quarter of 2020, but aims to produce 250,000 of them in the second quarter of the year. Upton said that, as far as he knows, this is the first time Raspberry Pi has been used as a component in a medical device.
It's interesting that manufacturers are getting more creative with their designs and adopting technology that is typically associated with the DIY community. Hopefully, this approach will bring more ventilators to the healthcare system and help save even more lives.
