With the COVID-19 pandemic claiming lives daily, the atmosphere in the country is one of fear and distrust. The medical infrastructure is saturated and there is a dire scarcity of COVID resources like oxygen cylinders, hospital beds, ambulances, medicines and the like.
Last year in a similarly dire situation, Maker’s Asylum, a small community makerspace in Goa (previously based in Mumbai) had launched a crowdfunding campaign for ‘M-19’ face shields. Even though their initiative started with the aim of providing only 1000 ‘M-19’ shields to the frontline workers, they were eventually able to provide over 1 Million M-19 face shields through #theM19Collective.
This year too, Maker’s has risen to the occasion and launched a drive to start producing the established open-source Oxi Kit oxygen concentrator in the hackerspace community using locally-manufactured parts, while also launching a crowdfunding effort to cover their development, prototyping and certification work, as reported by Hackaday. Essentially, they aim to offer a decentralised way of manufacturing and bring relief to the extremely resource crunched hospitals in India.
If you want to donate to the campaign, join the M-19 Collective to make these in your city/town/village.
If you want to know more about Maker’s Asylum & their work, check out their website.
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