Building a ventilator that meets the essential requirements of the MHRA is not hard. At all. The tech is ancient and not in patent and the thing looks to be built out of bent sheet metal, likely using industrial lego tubing inside and their existing motor tech as they have it, it works and they know the issues. Modern ventilators are, like most medical kit, insanely expensive, complex and full of patented stuff. But, the fundamentals are not hard to do, especially with a bunch of engineers who really know their stuff. There are a load of optional MHRA criteria which are nice to haves but fulfilling the essentials isn't hard and I reckon most people on here with a couple of weeks to do the research could design and build one. The clever part is to build one which can be produced fast and will be reliable as you don't have time for testing. I'd personally go for a mostly mechanically moderated design with a couple of timers for varying respiratory rate and so on. Once that really simple stuff is in place, I'd pop in a micro controller with firmware that can be updated to enable the optional criteria later on after the thing has been built. What happens a lot in medical devices is you have a fancy ASIC type thing with a brain box, NAND, etc which gives you access to the fancy stuff but you also have, below that, a very simple system that kicks in if the fancy stuff fails. Example is a pacemaker where you have all the fancy stuff but beneath that you have a capacitor bank, a timer and a battery which just paces at a specific rate and high outputs to keep the patient alive if the device's brains get mushed.
That design looks pretty damned awesome I must say. You're going to have a whole load of people who have never touched a ventilator running these things under supervision from a distance and so simplicity is essential. The mobility side of things is great too as the whole environment is going to be very fluid and fast moving so having these things bolted to the bedside is great.
I'm really hoping I can get back to work for when the crisis really hits my home town but I don't think they're going to let me near. I've got a suppressed immune system and so the best thing I can do is to not get sick and take up resources as minor infections have a habit of trying to kill me. It's a standing joke that I have a good crack at dying from a simple bug roughly every 18 months. I'm therefore due. So I'm sat at home, making hand sanitiser for the vulnerable who can't get any, fixing the neighbours household appliances, reading, playing games I have never got around to playing, thinking of a fun way to fix our downstairs bog and picking locks out of boredom and frustration.
1.5 weeks off work and I'm going utterly mad but on the upside, my 12 core beast of a CPU is adding to the distributed compute effort AND keeping my house warm. I'm quite pleased that it can now sustain full load on all but two 24 logical cores (I think it leaves them part loaded so Windows still works) at a stable 4.0GHz and hovers around 75C. On the downside, my AMD GPU doesn't appear to be used much as they seem to rely on CUDA support for any real grunt. It's a shame as the Vega64 is a great compute card, even if it's a little saggy as a graphics card.