Members of an all-female Afghan robotics team working on an open source, low-cost fan (Reuters)
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In eastern Afghanistan’s town of Herat, 18-year-old high school student Somaya Faruqi adjusts a suction hood as she puts the finishing touches on before revealing a light, inexpensive fan she created and six other young women.
The Afghan all-female robotics team, which has won international awards for its robots, began work in March on a low-cost open source ventilator as the coronavirus pandemic hit the war-torn nation.
It took the team almost four months to finalize the fan, which is partly based on a design by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and they received expert advice from Harvard University.
The device is easy to transport, can run on battery for 10 hours and costs around $ 700 to produce, compared to the price of $ 20,000 for a traditional fan.
“We are delighted to have been able to take our first step in the field of medicine and to be able to also serve people in this field. All of our team members feel happy because after months of hard work we have been able to reach this result, “Faruqi told Reuters.
Although the ventilator still needs to undergo final testing from health authorities before it can be used, authorities are welcoming it into a country with only 800 ventilators to treat the growing number of coronavirus cases in a health system damaged by decades of war.
Ministry of Health spokesperson Akmal Samsor said that once the ventilators are approved, they will be deployed to Afghan hospitals and the design will be shared with the World Health Organization.
“We appreciate the initiative and creativity in the health sector in Afghanistan … after their approval, we will use these fans and we are determined to conclude contracts with companies so that we can also export them”, a- he declared.
Afghanistan has registered around 35,500 cases of COVID-19 and 1,181 deaths, although experts warn that the actual number is likely to be much higher due to low test rates.
(Report by Storay Karimi, Jalil Rezaee and Orooj Hakimi; additional reports by Hameed Farzad and Sayed Hassib; written by Charlotte Greenfield, edited by Ed Osmond)
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
