A team of researchers from the Health Innovation via Engineering lab, at NUI Galway, have created an autonomous drone that uses ultraviolet light to strerilize surfaces. It is called the UVCDrone and was developed after the first surge of COVID-19 in Ireland as a way to deal with a possible second wave of the pandemic.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, healthcare services all over the world were facing severe shortages of ventilators necessary to treat patients with Covid-19. Knowing about this problem, Brandi Gerstner, an engineer at the University of Maryland, wondered if breast pump could be converted into ventilators: "You know they're reliable, they've been used by moms everywhere for decades. What if I could reverse it?"

So, she took apart her old breast pump and found out that the air flow, that usually flow inward to produce suction, could easily be reversed.

Couple develops system to decontaminate thousands of N95 masks

Laurie and Kevin Hommema are a married couple from Columbus Ohio. Laurie is a family physician at the OhioHealth hospital network and Kevin is a principal researcher at Battelle Memorial Institute a nonprofit research organization.

As countries started lifting lockdown measures imposed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, people all around the world were concerned about how to get back to normal life while still following the health and safety measures required to prevent the spread of the virus. Particularly, on how to get back to enjoying leisure activities and spend time together with friends and loves-ones.

The Tripon family is one of doctors, dentists and entreperneurs. During the Covid-19 pandemic, they were worried about the safety of their loved-ones, especially due to the lack of protective equipment that was being felt in healthcare facilites all over the world

“Even before the lockdown was announced … we were very concerned about protecting our loved ones from this deadly virus since most of them will be … front-liners” explained Mike Tripon.

A team of students at Lovely Professional University developed a contactless dustbin for healthcare services called “Ally”. The motivation to develop this device was the create specialized equipment to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic, especially in healthcare services, to keep the workers safe from exposure to the virus.

“At times such as the present, there is a pressing need for frontline workers to work in a safer environment, and Ally is a smart contactless dustbin in that sense,” the student added.

Carlo Ratti and Italo Rota, two designers and architects from Italy, created CURA - Connected Units for Respiratory Ailments. CURA are healthcare pods created through the conversion of shipping containers.

These pods where created as emergency healthcare facilities that could be easily built, contributing to reduce the pressure the Covid-19 pandemic was exerting on healthcare systems all over the world.

Louise Stephenson was worried about the prospect of her son going back to school, as school re-open after the easing of lockdown measures put in place due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Her main concern was how Harry, a 11-year-old, would be able to stay safe and follow the social distancing rules required to prevent infection. “There are parents around the country who will have the same concerns about the fact their children may be returning to school in the near future”, said Louise.

Seacon Square shopping mall in Bangkok has replaced elevator buttons for foot pedals, as a safety measure put in place to help prevent the spread of the new coronavirus. This innovation was installed as the mall reopens after being closed for 2 months, during the country’s lockdown period

A team of volunteers created OpenMeal, a platform that supports two vulnerable communities: restaurants struggling to keep their businesses open and families struggling to get food. The platform was developed during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the team of volunteers, mostly of Asian descent, realized that Asian-American restaurants and low income families were being severely affect by the social-economic side effects of the pandemic.

A group of college students from Instituto Superior Técnico, in Lisbon, created “EPIs contra o COVID-19” (PPE against COVID-19) an online quiz that is meant to help people understand how to correctly wear personal protective equipment. The quiz is available on the Kahoot platform and is comprised of 12 questions, carefully selected so that the public has access to “interactive and didactic information, in order to be able to properly wear PPE, thereby protecting themselves and others”, explained Luciane Eichelt, one of the creators of the game.

In 2018, Gina was diagnosed with acanthamoeba keratitis and had to be in quarantine for a month. During that time, she says: “I experienced an incredible amount of loneliness and anxiety, and so it meant the world to me whenever I received a get-well-soon card”.

So, during the Covid-19 pandemic, she wanted to make a difference and help ease the feelings of loneliness and anxiety felth by patients suffering from Covid-19 and healthcare workers risking their lives to battle this disease.

Designers from Russia have developed a protective face mask that can be constructed out of cardboard and fitted with interchangeable filters.

The product is called the BUMASK and has a very simple design, consisting of a foldable pattern that can be printed at home. The idea behind the design is that it could be produced extremely fast, with readily available materials and without requiring any specialized tools or technical skills.

A group of four high school students from Portugal developed an app to monitor the real time capacity of 580 beaches across the country. The app is called SandSpace and the aim is for people to check the app before going to the beach, to determine if it is overcrowded or not.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization and each country’s National Health Authorities were advising citizens to maintain social distance and follow proper health and safety measures. In order to make this process easier, Prabin Kumar Das developed Kawach - a device that combines many features designed to help people navigate life during the pandemic and reduce the spread of the virus.

Members of the CII-Young Indians from Chennai worked together with two other association to launch the Sugadharam project, to provide the Chennai population with safe stations where people can sanitize their hands. The idea came as a result of the recommendations from heath authorities about the need for frequent hand washing during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Abd Ali Atwi and Ali Hassan, two engineering students from Lebanon, teamed up to create robots that are able to disinfect large areas and, as such, help control the spread of the new coronavirus.

The robots are equipped with a tank that holds up to 25 litres of disinfectant and can spray as far as 2 to 3 meters from a given point. The robots can be remotely controlled from a distance of 1 km away.

The main goal is that these robots can replace sanitation workers in the task of disinfecting large outdoor areas, lowering the risk of exposure to the virus.

Researchers from the University of Waterloo Vision and Image Processing Lab and the startup DarwinAI partnered to create COVID-Net - a convolutional neural network for COVID-19 detection from chest radiographies.

They started working on this project with the objective of using their expertise to develop an AI-based tool that could help in the screening and diagnosis of patients for Covid-19.

Akaer is a Brazilian company that develops high tech solutions for Aerospace and Defense Markets. However, during the Covid-19 pandemic, they felt the need to use their expertise and resources to contribute in some way to the fight against the virus. After receiving several requests from healthcare professionals, they started working on a barrier enclosure to protect healthcare personnel during the procedure of intubating or extubating patients with Covid-19.

During the Covid-19 pandemic it was very important for people to have access to the latest information about the spread of the disease and the safety measures that must be followed. To ensure that, a South African non-profit organization created a WhatsApp bot that can deliver the latest information to millions of people. Gustav Praekelt, founder of the organization, explained what was the motivation : “We were worried that our users wouldn't have access to a trusted source of information.