Industrial AI company, SparkCognition, has joined a group of businesses to produce face shields and prototype ventilators using industrial 3D printers, which will be donated to COVID-19 ATX Exchange.
The initiative, started by Dell Medical School at UT Austin to connect community needs with solutions, comes as a response to a national shortage threat of medical equipment meant to treat patients diagnosed with COVID-19 and protect healthcare workers.
Additionally, the company has donated a significant amount of its compute resources to Folding@Home (F@h), a crowdsourcing project to research COVID-19, with the goal to discover the virus’s vulnerabilities.
SparkCognition is working with representatives from organisations including: Trailside Creative, Dell Technologies, Masks for Docs – Austin Chapter, and Dell Med to scale manufacturing of a standardised face shield design.
With these designs, the companies will leverage multiple manufacturing processes, like industrial 3D printers and laser cutting, to produce the personal protective equipment. This equipment will be used by healthcare organisations in Austin and community organisations that have to continue crucial work but would otherwise not be prioritised for this gear.
“A couple of days ago, SparkCognition responded to our call for face shields on the exchange website and immediately offered to make and donate about 1,000 to our initiative. The need for these shields is quickly growing, so we would like to invite other companies with similar capabilities to contact us through our exchange website to discuss ways to get involved,” said Nishi Viswanathan, Director of the Texas Health Catalyst at Dell Med.
To further their efforts, SparkCognition is also donating compute power from servers, cloud resources, and laptops and desktops to Folding@Home. F@h is a distributed computing project that works to help scientists better understand biology, and to provide new opportunities for developing therapeutics. F@h has recently increased efforts to research COVID-19, and has asked for the public’s help.
“SparkCognition has some tremendous employees who go above and beyond in many ways. When they heard of the shortage of medical supplies and the need for compute power during this pandemic, they came to leadership with a way to help.” said Amir Husain, founder and CEO at SparkCognition. “Now that we have the ball rolling on these initiatives, we encourage other individuals and organisations which have the capability to join us in this initiative.”
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Post written by: Matt Brown
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