COVID19 is currently spreading exponentially throughout the world. Governments are taking increasingly drastic measures to slow the disease in order to prevent our medical infrastructure from being overwhelmed. Roughly 10-20% of those that contract COVID19 require hospitalization and often need intense care. If COVID19 infections proceed at the current rate there will not be enough medical hardware available to prevent the higher mortality rates now observed in Italy. There is thus a desperate need for medical hardware to help treat COVID19 patients. Today, with the evolution of digital manufacturing technologies such as 3-D printers and circuit milling systems, we can share designs with others who can then replicate medical-grade devices for the cost of locally-sourced materials. Large groups of makers, engineers, and medical professionals are already collaborating on the web to make open source medical devices, such as ventilators, to have a fast and easy solution that can be reproduced and assembled locally worldwide. However, there is a concern in the medical community about using these devices without some assurance that these devices will operate as intended and not do harm. This special issue is dedicated to vetting the technical specifications and reproducibility of open medical hardware that can help during this global pandemic. Due to the urgency all articles will be rapidly peer-reviewed, published open access upon acceptance, and all article processing charges will be waived.

We are specifically looking for hardware that: 1) can be digitally manufactured using accessible low-cost fabrication tools like 3-D printers and 2) those that can be readily constructed from widely accessible materials and simple tools (e.g. DIY hardware store sourced).

Examples include: Ventilator Machines, Negative Pressure Rooms (Airborne Infection Isolation Rooms - AIIR), Oxygen Concentrators, Pulse Oximeters, Flow-Splitter for Oxygen Supplies, Flowmeters, Nasal Prongs / Nasal Cannulae, Flexible Nasal Catheters, Oxygen Masks, Non-Contact Thermometers, N95 Respirators, and Powered Air Purifying Respirators.

For this issue we invite submissions that adhere to the following guidelines:

Any hardware that has been developed to assist care for COVID19 infections and is released under open source licenses.

Submissions must outline how the hardware can be used, how to build the hardware, a validation of the hardware function, a bill of materials, and accompanying detailed design files hosted in a registered open repository such as the Open Science Framework (osf.io), Mendeley Data , or Zenodo (find the complete repository instructions here).

, or Zenodo (find the complete repository instructions here). All papers must be formatted using the HardwareX submission templates in Word or Latex.

All submitted papers must be clearly written in English and contain only original work, which has not been published by or is currently under review for any other journal.

We encourage authors to make their submissions publicly available via preprints prior to submission and during peer-review .

The editors of this issue will carefully consider the quality of the online documentation for all submitted papers, including the ability for replication. We hope to set a standard where all the hardware in the papers in this issue can be replicated by others with a reasonable amount of effort.

All papers will be peer-reviewed by independent reviewers.

Details on how to submit to HardwareX

A detailed submission guideline is available as “Guide to Authors” at:

All manuscripts and any supplementary material should be submitted through the journal’s submission system: https://www.editorialmanager.com/ohx/default.aspx. Authors must select the issue “VSI: COVID19 Medical Hardware” when they reach the “issue” step in the submission process.

HardwareX is an open access publication and authors are normally required to cover the Article Processing Charge of $500. All Article Processing Charges will be waived for this special issue.

Editors in Chief

Prof. Dr. Todd Duncombe, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Dept. of BioSystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE), Basel, Switzerland

Prof. Dr. Joshua Pearce, The Richard Witte Professor of Materials Science & Engineering and Electrical & Computer Engineering, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, Michigan, United States

Important dates

New extended submission deadline: 31st October 2020

Accepted version will be made available online within a week time (between 5 to 7 days) of its acceptance.

Please note: Each article in this issue will be assigned a unique identifier and then published in a regular journal issue as soon as available. The unique identifier allows us to simultaneously add the article to a Special Issue section on ScienceDirect which is gradually built up as individual articles are published online. Articles grouped together in the Special Issue will retain their original citation details. This approach speeds up the publication of individual articles as we do not need to wait for the final article to be ready before publication.