helpfulETH – engineering solutions to help healthcare in the face of COVID-19

helpfulETH is an initiative by the ETH Domain and Swiss academia. Its aim is to place the expertise of Swiss academia and Swiss industrial partners at the disposal of the Swiss healthcare system in order to offer as much support as possible to tackle COVID-19.

helpfulETH operates as a point of contact, matching needs of healthcare providers with project teams who work on quick and implementable solutions. The project teams consist of volunteers from the broad array of the ETH domain’s network. Volunteers have widely varying skill-sets, as they are engineers, scientists, researchers, doctors, legal specialists and many more.

The initiative helpfulETH started as an idea by the Feasibility Lab for Healthcare Innovation, located at pd|z and founded by Prof. Mirko Meboldt (Chair of Product Development and Engineering Design) together with Prof. Detlef Günther (Vice President for Research and Corporate Relations) at ETH Zurich in January 2020.

As the first still subtle signs of COVID-19 reached Switzerland, the Feasibility Lab reached out to Universitätsspital Zürich, realizing the need to support healthcare stakeholders in this possible challenge. Students and researchers at pdz started to put together outlines for a project structure. Simultaneously, other institutions within the ETH Domain launched similar initiatives. While the extent of the COVID-19 situation increased, healthcare providers also began reaching out.

It became clear that the best way forward was to join forces: Professors at EPFL instantly showed their full support. Prof. David Atienza Alonso (Director of the Section of EE (SEL) and Head of Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL) at the School of Engineering) takes the leading role in coordinating the initiative helpfulETH from the EPFL-side, also connecting to the initiatives already taken by EPFL.

Growing daily

helpfulETH is growing daily and is happy to witness the coming together of the academic community! The initiative helpfulETH has several projects in progress, with new ones being added continuously. Some solutions are already being used in hospitals. The reception has been one of great appreciation among burdened healthcare personnel - a sentiment, which only inspires the volunteers to work even harder!
You can find more information about helpfulETH and about how to participate as a volunteer on the helpfulETH homepage and in the ETH News.

helpfulETH is part of the ETH external page task force.
 

The face shields produced by the helpfulETH-team are already being used in several hospitals around Switzerland and are being tested together with healthcare partners. The team works in close collaboration with the Student Project House for the manufacturing, while always making sure to keep social distancing rules.  

Within days, the team has developed a prototype to help doctors and nurses with their internal communication when working in a highly infectious environment. Diligent testing is performed at the Universitätsspital Zürich under the lead of Dr. med. Daniel Kirschenbaum Ph.D., senior physician at the Institute of Neuropathology

Universitätsspital Zürich has been a very dedicated healthcare partner for helpfulETH from the start, with senior physicians giving generously of their scarce time to help with expert know how for fast implementation.

In order to help hospital staff rotate patients who suffer from severe COVID-19 symptoms, the team is developing a rotation process that requires less medical staff and improves the position of the patients. Advanced studies are underway.