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Are there any projects currently developing libre medical equipment?

Obviously, this would include the designs and instructions to build common medical equipment, including:

  1. Autoclaves
  2. Microscopes
  3. EKG machines
  4. Hematology analyzers
  5. Ultrasound machines
  6. Defibrillators
  7. Ventilators
  8. X-ray machines
  9. etc

...but it should also include machines needed to make basic medical consumables, including:

  1. Saline
  2. Antibiotics
  3. Insulin
  4. etc

Are there currently any projects that have designed any of these technologies for medical use, released with an open license?

Michael Altfield
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  • Please review the on-topic guidelines, in particular "there are some questions which should not be asked here [...] recommendations for Free/Open software or media". – Philip Kendall Feb 25 '24 at 16:47
  • This question is not asking for a recommendation of software or media. It's on-topic. – Michael Altfield Feb 25 '24 at 17:24
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    Sure, the definition doesn't explicitly say "hardware project suggestions" are off-topic as well but my opinion is that they are - this kind of "list" question is generally off-topic across the whole Stack Exchange network. But let's see what the community thinks. – Philip Kendall Feb 25 '24 at 17:32
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    Michael, you should probably read What's wrong with external resources questions?, which is one of our principal site-specific closure reasons, before you get too sure. At the moment, this looks to me like a textbook example of an external-resources question, though I'm holding fire with the mod hammer pro tem. – MadHatter Feb 26 '24 at 06:41

1 Answers1

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Having worked in the medical industry and other highly regulated industries, I don't believe that there are, nor will there ever be, projects for libre medical equipment.

In regulated industries, the products have to comply with certain norms in order to be allowed to be brought to the market. Those norms exist to ensure the product is as safe as it can be (while still doing its job) and they cover everything from design to manufacturing. Those norms also make it impossible to disclaim liabilities..

If you create a medical device, it has to conform to the relevant norms. And if you claim that your product conforms to those norms, you better prove that it does, because you are liable if it later turns out that your product contains a flaw.

With libre medical devices, there are two parties that could be held liable if an incident occurs: The person who built the device and the person/organization who provided the designs. For both of those, the risk imposed by the liability and being unable to control the other party means that creating libre medical devices is a sure way to bankruptcy.

Bart van Ingen Schenau
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  • liability doesn't affect the designers; it affects the manufacturers and users. Of course this is hard. But of course it's inevitable that such projects will exist. We already have projects working on libre ventilators, for example, from the COVID-19 pandemic https://github.com/Recovid/ – Michael Altfield Feb 26 '24 at 14:22