As personal protective equipment stock was running uncomfortably low in hospitals, M Health Fairview contacted the U’s College of Science and Engineering for help designing disposable gowns for its health care workers. Within two weeks, a team of 18 students had created a safe, functional gown that was in production only a week later.

With help from 3M and Clorox Healthcare, M Health Fairview’s unique mobile UV tower system allows for a fast, streamlined process to decontaminate N95 masks, easing the strain on supply chains for personal protective equipment. The system maintains the integrity and performance of masks for up to six decontamination cycles. M Health Fairview now decontaminates an average of 1,144 masks per week.

Also on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic are health and sanitation workers, who put themselves in harm’s way to disinfect public places. A College of Science and Engineering team is modifying a robot it had previously created (to measure the density of asphalt, pictured) to instead sanitize areas like hospital waiting rooms and airplane cabins.

Planning for the day that hospitals would have more patients needing respiratory support than ventilators to help them, experts from the U’s Medical School and Earl E. Bakken Medical Devices Center teamed up to create a backup mechanical ventilator. With design partner Boston Scientific and input from Medtronic Inc., the team saw the concept through to product development in less than a month. The so-called Coventor is compact—about the size of a cereal box—and relatively inexpensive to manufacture and distribute. Its open-source design is available online to manufacturers across the globe. Digi-Key, MGC Diagnostics, Protolabs, and Teknic Inc. provided financial and in-kind support for the project.

The current COVID-19 test, an unpleasant nasal swab, can make even the most courageous patient squirm. Today Medical School ophthalmologists are working on an efficient, convenient, and less painful testing method that they hope will provide more accurate results as well: by looking for the virus in tears, collected noninvasively through microcapillary tubes.

A testing booth designed by staff in the College of Science and Engineering put an easy-to-clean glass wall between patients and providers. Gloves extending from the booth allow a staff person inside to safely swab patients for COVID-19 without cycling through valuable N95 masks, face shields, isolation gowns, or other PPE. The exterior of the booth is cleaned between visits.