NASA teams around the country have been working on various technologies to help address the COVID-19 pandemic. In early April, NASA utilized an existing internal community platform, NASA@WORK, to conduct an agency-wide brainstorm to generate ideas for how the agency’s expertise could be used to leverage other efforts to combat the disease. Over a period of two weeks, 250 ideas were generated, another 500 comments were posted, and 4,500 votes were cast. The platform is generally designed to promote collaboration to solve specific challenges.
“NASA’s strength has always been our ability and passion—collective and individual—for solving problems,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. “All the work being done shows how NASA is uniquely equipped to aid in the federal response to coronavirus by leveraging the ingenuity of our workforce, mobilizing investments made in the U.S. space agency to combat this disease, and working with public and private partnerships to maximize results.”
VITAL Ventilator
Beyond harnessing ideas on the NASA@WORK platform, NASA’s efforts to combat COVID-19 have already been productive as a team from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California designed and developed a prototype ventilator in just 37 days. The device, called VITAL (Ventilator Intervention Technology Accessible Locally), is a high-pressure ventilator that could be used to boost the nation’s limited supply of the critical life support machines that are necessary to treat acute COVID-19 patients.
The VITAL machine could be a boon during the pandemic because it can be manufactured more quickly than standard ventilators, is easier to maintain, and consists of fewer parts—an aspect that’s important as supply chains are being pushed to the limit. VITAL also features a flexible design that can be used in a variety of settings, from ICUs to field hospitals. NASA is currently trying to get the device approved by the FDA through an expedited process.
“We were very pleased with the results of the testing we performed in our high-fidelity human simulation lab,” said Dr. Matthew Levin, director of innovation for the Human Simulation Lab and associate professor of Anesthesiology, Preoperative and Pain Medicine, and Genetics and Genomics Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “The NASA prototype performed as expected under a wide variety of simulated patient conditions. The team feels confident that the VITAL ventilator will be able to safely ventilate patients suffering from COVID-19 both here in the United States and throughout the world.”
Aerospace Helmet
In addition to the VITAL ventilator, NASA developed an Aerospace Valley Positive Pressure Helmet that can be used to deliver oxygen to COVID-19 patients with mild symptoms in a similar fashion as a CPAP machine, and help ensure that standard ventilators are available for patients with more acute symptoms. CPAP machines work by forcing air into a patient’s lungs but are administered through a face mask and don’t require intubation. Work on the pressure helmet was done in partnership with the City of Lancaster’s Antelope Valley Hospital, Virgin Galactic, The Spaceship Company, Antelope Valley College, and Antelope Valley Task Force. The device, which was used at the Antelope Valley Hospital, has been submitted to the FDA for authorization.
Decontamination System
Another NASA team at the Glenn Research Center in Ohio worked in partnership with Emergency Products + Research to develop and produce a decontamination system called AMBUstat that kills microbes on surfaces. The device, which is small, portable and inexpensive, can be used to decontaminate ambulances and other emergency vehicles in less than an hour and more cheaply than existing systems. The research efforts are still underway to optimize the system for use against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.