Belkin, the Company That Makes iPhone Cables, Pivots To Ventilators (usatoday.com) 73
Belkin International, the company that makes iPhone charging cables and home routers, has started making what it calls "low-cost" ventilators at manufacturing plants in Providence, Rhode Island. USA Today reports: These are sub-$200 units aimed for emergencies and less severe cases of COVID-19, compared to more full-featured units that cost in the tens of thousands of dollars. "This is one of the most urgent humanitarian crises we have experienced in our lifetimes and the number one responsibility for each of us in this moment is the care and compassion for others in need," said Chet Pipkin, CEO and founder of Belkin. "It was obvious there's a critical need for ventilators and not just for the short term," says Pipkin. "We have no excuse not to get prepared." It's looking to make at least 10,000 ventilators.
So how did it learn how to go outside of their zone to medical supplies? "We felt a responsibility to be helpful to others," he says, but acknowledges that Belkin didn't have the expertise to design a ventilator. "We reached out to the network," and found experts to guide the way. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Grainger College of Engineering had the design, and Belkin also consulted with Carle Health of Urbana, Illinois, for what's being called the FlexVent. It's under production now, but pending the review and approval of its Emergency Use Authorization application by the Food and Drug Administration. Belkin's pitch: the FlexVent will be used as a single-use emergency ventilator that can provide constant-flow, pressure-cycled ventilation automatically to patients in respiratory distress.
So how did it learn how to go outside of their zone to medical supplies? "We felt a responsibility to be helpful to others," he says, but acknowledges that Belkin didn't have the expertise to design a ventilator. "We reached out to the network," and found experts to guide the way. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Grainger College of Engineering had the design, and Belkin also consulted with Carle Health of Urbana, Illinois, for what's being called the FlexVent. It's under production now, but pending the review and approval of its Emergency Use Authorization application by the Food and Drug Administration. Belkin's pitch: the FlexVent will be used as a single-use emergency ventilator that can provide constant-flow, pressure-cycled ventilation automatically to patients in respiratory distress.
Data? (Score:2)
88% of those put on the expensive Ventilator died, how about those on the cheap one?
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Re: Data? (Score:1)
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And I'll opt for a pure oxygen mask because that's what you actually treat lung tissue damage with.
You still need something to force it into the lungs.
Didn't They Hear? (Score:4, Informative)
We are sending Ventilators overseas now.
I think they missed their moment.
Re: Didn't They Hear? (Score:4, Informative)
Nice try, though, Boris.
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Often the best treatment is to not go overboard.
If your lungs are so bad then pure O2 may be better. However if they are good enough to heal on their own with a ventilator that is often the better action.
Besides if your lungs are not inhaling and exhaling the O2 Mask will not work too well.
Re:Data? (Score:4)
And I'll opt for a pure oxygen mask because that's what you actually treat lung tissue damage with.
If you're offered a ventilator then pure oxygen has already failed. Despite what you think you aren't actually smarter than the medical profession.
Re:Data? Pure Oxygen Bad (Score:1)
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Re: Data? (Score:3, Informative)
Because NEWSFLASH, ventilators don't help if your alveoles are shot! Because that's what the Coronavirus does!
Researchers have been saying that for months!
Yet somehow, nobody seems to have gotten that partcular obvious memo.
Il's like installing an electric motor to run the turbocharger, when your pistons are gone!
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+1
Avoid early intubation that is based solely on oxygen requirements. Allow "Permissive hypoxemia" as tolerated.
https://covid19criticalcare.co... [covid19criticalcare.com]
Re: Data? (Score:5, Interesting)
As close as I get to being a medical profession is my mother is now a long retired surgical nurse.
Having spoken about this subject with her, though here is my understanding. You are right for a ventilators to help you have to have basic pulmonary function intact, and yes COVID attacks it. Ventilators have a nasty habit of pushing undesirables like virus and bacteria deeper into lung tissue, so they may make a COVID infection worse.
Ventilators are a magic bullet when you have patient who has some nervous system issue or trauma to the lungs or diaphragm that prevent normal respiration, you address the problem head on. They are useful if you have patient on strong narcotics or other drugs that can cause some to suddenly stop breathing.
Ventilators CAN be useful in patients that have diseases such as pneumonia or other infection of the bronchi causing constriction, or convulsion. Often times patients become exhausted from the effort of breathing and "give up" at which time without a ventilator they you know die.
We do know now, and according to mom a lot of the practitioners should have assumed that yes ventilators do push COVID deeper into lung and in terms of getting positive outcomes that is BAD. Oxygen enrichment only should have been the preferred treat right up until patients either butt up against losing the will to carry on or the measured blood oxygen falls to hazardous levels. A lot of the early treatment seems to have been way to quick to resort to ventilators, in terms of doing what is best for the individual patient. However mom also pointed out that with over burdened staff its a lot easier to nurse a sedate patient on a ventilator than one who is in constant agony struggling to breath; to whom you must also be extremely careful giving narcs to for fear of suppressing breathing more.
Re: Data? (Score:1)
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A lot of the early treatment seems to have been way to quick to resort to ventilators, in terms of doing what is best for the individual patient. However mom also pointed out that with over burdened staff its a lot easier to nurse a sedate patient on a ventilator than one who is in constant agony struggling to breath; to whom you must also be extremely careful giving narcs to for fear of suppressing breathing more.
What's interesting though is that there seems to be reports suggesting that often people who have significant enough lung damage from the infection that they would normally struggle to breathe for some reason aren't.
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One possibility is incorrectly taken oxygen readings. There are two ways of reading oxygen — a pulse ox meter on your finger and a blood gas analysis taken from a blood sample. They can fail in different ways.
When people have severe illness, it can massively raise their white blood count, and those white blood cells use oxygen. So if you don't cool down the blood sample immediately (to make the white blood cells more dormant) or get the sample to the lab very quickly, the WBCs can use a significant
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Oxygen enrichment only should have been the preferred treat right up until patients either butt up against losing the will to carry on or the measured blood oxygen falls to hazardous levels.
Err it is. O2 therapy is recommended for all patience except for the ones with severe ARDS. That was the guidance the WHO issued on the 28th of January and that remains unchanged.
I'm not sure where people are getting the idea that every idiot with a sneeze gets put on a ventilator.
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As someone else whose mother also happens to be a retired medical professional (doctor of obstetrics), I've been getting a lot of that same information as you second hand from her. Everything you said sounds like what medical professionals have been learning about this virus over the last few months.
The really interesting thing I read from a colleague of hers in the early days of the outbreak in western countries was that they were experiencing extreme mortality rates for people who went on ventilators. S
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Ventilators wont help if ALL (or most) of you alveoles are shot. However some patients have limited function, and ventilators will help while the body heals the broken parts.
Catching Covid-9 is like a game of roulette. You may get no symptoms and feel fine (but pass it to others), You may feel like you have a cold or flu and get over it, or you can be in a life threatening condition. There is a huge range of problems that can happen. Saying that some problems ventilators won't fix, well Duh.
It is like sa
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It's incredible that we have so many medical doctors here in /. who are qualified to determine what is and isn't a useful therapy.
Re: Data? (Score:2)
Il's like installing an electric motor to run the turbocharger, when your pistons are gone!
Please don't attempt another car analogy.
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Given that we're talking about Belkin, they'll probably die when the ventilators catch fire.
My two experiences with Belkin products have resulted in them having the dubious distinction of being the only company on my permanent ban list. I will not buy their products; I will not use their products; I will not allow their products in my house, even if unplugged.
The first was an ADB-USB adapter. When I plugged it in, my computer shut down to save itself. The device was dead-shorted. This resulted in a dec
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88% of those put on the expensive Ventilator died, how about those on the cheap one?
Who cares if it's junk? It's a sweeeet government contract with guaranteed sales.
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17% Survive where without it, it would be nearly 0% who would survive.
For Medical Equipment there are factors on its price.
1. Covering Law Suites. Being that health care can sometimes lead to someone dying, and sometimes it was in theory preventable. The lawsuit will often after the fact and see that something could had been done that wasn't. Thus would lead to a legal action against the hospital, which may lead against the equipment manufacturer. If the hospital wins the case against the equipment (or a
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OTOH, using a CPAP or BiPAP (i.e. your cheap ventilator) simply involved a face mask or even nasal mask, in which the devices sense an inhalation and will push, but, the patient does the work.
What appears to be the case is that with the patient working, the virus does less damage. Once a patient goes to invasive ventilator, it is all but over.
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The problem with the ventilators has to do with doctors and other staff having a lack of in depth training with them. This is a specialty of Respiratory Therapists, and there just aren't enough of them to go around. My wife is one, and long story short (because I simply don't remember all the reasons she's given me, but there are a lot), if you don't properly monitor and manage it, you can do lung damage. Introducing lung damage while fighting COVID-19 reduces the chances of the patient surviving. :( Wh
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88% of those put on the expensive Ventilator died, how about those on the cheap one?
You're assuming that price has an impact on people who are incredibly near death. If it makes you feel better you can die with a gold plated diamond encrusted ventilator.
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Where do you find such cables that are so crappy. I almost never have problems with cables from whatever vendor. Especially new. We had some broken Cat 5 Cables not working. But that was also because we needed an emergency tie-down. Are you taking these cables from peoples garage sales?
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Where do you find such cables that are so crappy
Amazon Basics. According to my data, they survive about 3 months of use by those under 9 years of age. I'm almost prepared to pay Monster Cable prices for cables if they can survive a 5yo boy.
But forget cables, this is electronic equipment. I've used a Belkin router before. It required a power cycle every week or two. If I get COVID and they try to hook me up to a Belkin ventilator, I'm going to take my chance with the Trump Windex Inhaler(TM).
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Try the ultra-long Amazon Basics cables. AFAIK, they're still made with a heavier gauge of wire to avoid a voltage drop over the longer length (much like Amazon's shorter cables used to be).
Caveat emptor: The larger wires mean that the connectors are larger, so they may not be compatible with some badly designed iPhone cases.
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Belkin sells braided core cables which, in my experience, are far less reliable than solid core cables for ethernet purposes. No idea what studies have found, but I've had enough bad experiences with braided core ethernet cables over the last 15 years (and I'm talking use in the hundreds of thousands, I used to set up and run large events) to avoid them entirely.
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I have had quality problems with "lowest bidder" cables. I've also had difficulty with self-terminated cables installed by mistrained fools, especially when they're taught not to leave any slack whatsoever in the cables and taught to trim as close as possible and use very poor quality crimping tools. The time spent going back and finding the mis-terminated, untested, unlabeled cables for a senior engineer contacted to clean up the mess far exceeds the savings of using the very poor quality cable often manda
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When I was still doing service the first thing that I used to do when an IP camera installed by someone else failed was hack the cable ends off and put new CAT-5 ends on them. That fixed about 2/3 of issues immediately.
(Can't do an adequate CAT-6 end to save my life, but they're fortunately not needed for security cameras.)
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I wonder if they're going to pull a stunt like they did with their webcams, and require a cloud monitoring service for the ventilators that they'll disable a few years from now.
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I hope for the sake of the patients that Belkin ventilators work better than Belkin cables. My experience is 1 out of 3 actually works.
Belkin ventilators: guaranteed not to fit right, and require RMA. Should be anyone's "do not buy" list.
Still? (Score:2)
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Re: Still? (Score:1)
Actually, the alveoles are often almost completely shot, and the, should oxygenate the blood dirextly.
Plasters included? (Score:2)
Pivot? (Score:1)
The company that makes.hackable routers, you mean? (Score:1)
And need some PR work now?*
Or did I confuse two companies there?
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(* Because god forbid actually changing. What matters is to *look* like you do, so you can keep not changing.)
I hope Belkin doesn't remotely disable/brick them (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope Belkin doesn't remotely disable/brick them when it decided it doesn't want to be in the IoT ventilator business anymore. :)
Could Belkin is just be using the open source ventilator design and putting a IoT O/S in it.
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They'll redirect all the control menus to advertising pages first.
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br. Meanwhile, you also cant clear out your lungs by coughing if you are on a ventilator, so whatever portion of your lungs still work still cant because its completely covered in mucus....
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2. SARS-CoV-2 is far from gone, despite us reopening everything as if it just went away.
3. Some people like not dying when they get sick.
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What he's noticing is that over 80% of the patients with COVID put on ventilators die. What he's not noticing is that this is a subset of patients that would be likely to die if not put on a ventilator, or some equivalent treatment. It's a last ditch effort.
OTOH, it's been reported that "proning"+Oxygen has good results in many of those cases, and it's much less intrusive than ventilators. But it may take more staff time, and have other problems. And the reports that I've heard are anecdotes, not studie
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A bit late? Possibly not. Possibly getting ready for the next surge, which will come after people carelessly reopen things.
More accurate headline (Score:4, Interesting)
Calling Belkin "The company that makes iPhone cables" while true doesn't come close to encompassing what the company as a whole does.
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Calling Belkin "The company that makes iPhone cables" while true doesn't come close to encompassing what the company as a whole does.
Its because every other Belkin product is complete shit...
You gotta put your best foot forward.
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Its because every other Belkin product is complete shit...
Bingo. I've helped several friends over the years setup or fix their wifi. First thing I do is make sure they don't have a Belkin or generic router. And if they need a router, I recommend any known brand but Belkin or Netgear. Netgear has improved dramatically over the years, but if you are buying new I'd rather see Linksys, or to save some money TP-Link or ASUS. Belkin products are equivalent to generic stuff at brand name prices, or worse.
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I hate to break this to you, but... Linksys has been owned by Belkin since 2013... Somewhat coincidentally, I stopped recommending or buying Linksys gear sometime around 2013... Mostly went with TP-Link gear supported by OpenWRT, but eventually grew tired of trying to find the stuff that was supported, whether or not I had to first downgrade the firmware, install DD-WRT, and *then* install OpenWRT, with somewhat flaky radios.
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Yup, my experience too. Belkin stuff is to be avoided, generally overpriced and of poor quality. The name has been around for a long time, so it's got name recognition, but Belkin gear is usually not a first choice.
Are they trying to kill people? (Score:2)
Every piece of Belkin hardware I ever bought was worthless junk.
How long until they're bricked? (Score:2)
How long until Belkin EOL's and bricks them [slashdot.org]?
When will we see them on tv? (Score:2)