MAINGEAR Retrofits Computer Manufacturing Facilities to Produce Ventilators for Intensive Care Units
MAINGEAR — an award-winning PC system integrator of custom gaming desktops, notebooks, and workstations — today announced that they will be utilizing their manufacturing facilities to produce affordable and high-quality emergency ventilators to aid hospitals in the fight against COVID-19. The MAINGEAR LIV can be produced at scale for approximately a quarter of the price of traditional ventilators.
New Jersey-based manufacturer MAINGEAR — known for building the industry’s most complex liquid cooling systems and high-performance PCs — is located twenty minutes outside of New York City, the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Due to the growing number of infected individuals needing treatment, there are significant shortages of ventilators in New York City hospitals. MAINGEAR is quickly re-tooling much of its production space for mass assembly of the MAINGEAR LIV — an emergency pulmonary ventilator for use in intensive care units on intubated patients.
The MAINGEAR LIV combines redundant power circuits, multiple safety features, and a unique coupling device that contains and drains exhaled aerosolized virus from the patient while allowing routine maintenance under severe conditions. Each unit has preset standard values for use by untrained personnel, as well as dedicated software that is controlled via touch screen interface, giving access to fine adjustments in addition to the manual regulation controls on the device. Working with its board of advisors, MAINGEAR looks to garner support for fast FDA approval under these extreme circumstances.
The MAINGEAR LIV project began with Rahul Sood, Chairman of the Board of MAINGEAR and co-founder of Unikrn, reaching out to MAINGEAR CEO Wallace Santos in order to find a way for the company to use its talent, expertise, and vast network to help address the shortage of ventilators currently being experienced during the growing pandemic. A board of advisors made up of medical professionals and experts in the field was assembled by Sood and Santos. As a result, MAINGEAR swiftly entered into the prototyping process.
“It was clear once this situation began to escalate that something had to be done,” said Wallace Santos, MAINGEAR Founder and CEO. “Within days of assembling our team, we had our first prototype ventilator ready to go. Besides the lack of medical supplies and equipment, we think there will be a shortage of medical professionals who can operate these devices especially in field hospitals, so we also made it incredibly simple to use. Now we need help getting the word out to the appropriate people.”
“Medical Ventilators are among the most critical devices required to deal with the sudden spike of hospitalized patients. There is a massive global shortage of these devices, so when MAINGEAR approached me about building one, I connected them with some inventor friends who could help,” said Deepak Kaura, a Pediatric Radiologist, Chief Medical Officer of 1QBit and a member of the Medical Advisory Board of MAINGEAR.
“We are experiencing the first wave of the pandemic. The lack of critical equipment such as ventilators is a key limitation in our response. This ventilator has the advantage of being portable, rugged, and easily operated by frontline personnel,” says Nahush Mokadam, Director of Cardiac Surgery at Ohio State University and a member of the Medical Advisory Board of MAINGEAR.
MAINGEAR and state and local officials are in discussions to place LIV ventilators where they are needed most. Currently, it is estimated by the American Hospital Association (AHA) that the United States could need as many as 960,000 ventilators as the pandemic progresses, with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo stating New York will need 30,000 ventilators as soon as two weeks from now. MAINGEAR will also scale to ship ventilators internationally when possible.
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