Walloon fablabs mobilize their resources: teams and tools (3D printers, 3D laser cutter,…) to develop solutions to fight coronavirus. A great surge of solidarity between the community of the fablabs, companies and the medical world with key words: open-source and collaborative innovation.
A fablab is a fabrication laboratory. A fleet of machines (digital and manual) is available to everyone for the design and production of objects.
The fablabs of Charleroi, Mons, Liège and Tournai produced a huge amount of faceshields for the medical sector. They also built plexiglass walls for shops. The Fablab of Liège (the Relab) also sent 1.000 faceshields in Italy.
At the Trakk, creative hub of Namur “developers are producing a syringe pump to inject the right dose of medication at a very precise speed. This will help hospitals as they start to have shortages of syringes because of their high demand for COVID-19 treatment. ” They also produced more than 30.000 faceshields .
Another example is the one of the Openhub, Creative Hub of Louvain-la-Neuve who developed the Breath4life project : an open source ventilator project. “Breath4life is a voluntary, non-profit, and open-source effort by a distributed team of engineers, doctors, industry players, investors to design, and produce low cost medical ventilators ”.
All the Walloon fablabs are mobilized! Congratulations to the teams for their responsiveness, commitment and creativity.
