Afghan all-women robotics team develop low-cost ventilator

According to a Reuters report, an all-female robotics team in Afghanistan won international awards for designing low-cost ventilators to help Coronavirus patients in the country. The team spent four months to design and develop the ventilator whose design is partly based on a design by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and guidance from experts at Harvard University. The ventilator can run on battery power for 10 hours and costs approximately US$700 to produce, while a traditional ventilator costs roughly US$20 000. Akmal Samsor, spokesman for Afghanistan’s Ministry of Health, said that once the ventilators are approved, they will be deployed to hospitals in the country and its design will be shared with the World Health Organization (WHO).