Press Kit

In March 2020, the Tetra Bio Distributed founders met on Helpful Engineering— a Slack-based incubator created to solve problems caused by COVID-19. The Tetra Vent Splitter concept was conceived by Jamie Waters, and soon attracted a team of engineers, medical experts, designers, and project managers. After five months of development, the Tetra Bio Distributed team is launching our alpha prototype, the Tetra Vent Splitter.

The Tetra Splitter extends a single ventilator’s capacity to treat up to four patients. With individual airflow control and monitoring, it addresses concerns of tidal flow control, respiratory virus spread, and ethical medical choices. The team has carefully considered medical explanations for avoiding vent splitting, and used them as engineering requirements to overcome. Tetra’s mechanism features an LCD screen displaying readings for each patient, giving medical professionals insight and control for individual treatment. Designed as a last-resort solution, the Tetra Vent Splitter provides doctors with an alternative to denying healthcare due to a resource shortage.

While COVID-19 treatment has shifted away from an intubation-intensive protocol, many developing countries are still in need of additional ventilator capacity. Vent splitters are also necessary beyond a COVID-19 use-case. Incidents like the 2017 Las Vegas shooting cause sudden demand for additional ventilator capacity. The splitter, while not a long-term care solution, is a necessary addition to any hospital’s disaster preparedness, and provides a far more sophisticated solution than the analogue vent splitters used in Las Vegas, Italy and New York.

Tetra Bio Distributed is committed to collaborative, open source development. We make all our work and resources publicly available. Our team of engineers and medical professionals work together to meet the rigor of FDA medical device standards, while remaining committed to our open-source values.

Everything we produce is replicable with limited resources. In addition to providing design and engineering documentation and an open invitation for collaboration, we will be publishing a DIY kit. The kit will include biocompatible 3D printing files and instructions, templates for cutting the mechanism’s housing, a parts list and purchasing guide, step-by-step assembly instructions, and recommended safety and testing procedures.