- Face shield design sourced from Ford
- Being manufactured at company’s Kandivali facility
- Also developing affordable ventilators in-house
- Ventilator manufacturing to start soon
Mahindra has been lending a helping hand in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. This multi-pronged approach includes offering engineering assistance in setting up quarantine zones, offering to provide rooms at Mahindra Holiday resort as temporary care facilities and building critical medical equipment. Today, the company also announced that it had begun manufacturing face shields for medical personnel and is in the final stages of manufacturing affordable ventilators.
Manufactured by a small team based at the company’s Kandivali facility, the shield is based on a design developed by Ford in the US in conjunction with 3M and GE Healthcare. These shields, used along with surgical/respirator masks, are critical in keeping medical personnel from contracting the virus while interacting with affected patients.
Mahindra is also helping manufacture and design ventilators. Ventilators are key survival equipment for patients who develop complications like pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome. The company is teaming up with two unnamed PSUs and an unnamed manufacturer of high-spec ventilators to simplify the design and help scale up manufacturing. At the same time, Mahindra’s team of engineers has come up with a cost-effective and easy-to-manufacture version of a bag valve mask ventilator, or Ambu bag prototype which will be manufactured as soon as the design is finalised.
Mahindra will share the designs of both the shield and the final version of their Ambu bag on the public domain so that anyone with the facilities and capabilities to manufacture them can do so.
