open-source ventilator open-source ventilator an open-source ventilator is a disaster-situation ventilator made using a freely licensed (open-source) design, and ideally, freely available components and parts (open-source hardware). designs, components, and parts may be anywhere from completely reverse-engineered or completely new creations, components may be adaptations of various inexpensive existing products, and special hard-to-find and/or expensive parts may be 3d-printed instead of purchased. as of early 2020, the levels of documentation and testing of open-source ventilators was well below scientific and medical-grade standards. this article is about disaster-situation machines that assist breathing. for standard ventilators used in the medical industry, see ventilator. the open-source ventilator's openlung project, an open-source, low-resource, quick-deployment mechanical ventilator design utilizes a bag valve mask (bvm or ambu-bag) as a core component. mechanics of the openlung ventilator one small, early prototype effort was the pandemic ventilator created in 2008 during the resurgence of h5n1 avian influenza that began in 2003, so named "because it is meant to be used as a ventilator of last resort during a possible avian (bird) flu pandemic." quality assessment the policy of using both free and open-source software (foss) and open-source hardware theoretically allows community-wide peer-review and correction of bugs and faults in open-source ventilators, which is not available in closed-source hardware development. in early 2020 during the covid-19 pandemic, a review of open-source ventilators stated that "the tested and peer-reviewed systems lacked complete documentation and the open systems that were documented were either at the very early stages of design ... and were essentially only basically tested ..." the author speculated that the pandemic would motivate development that would significantly improve the open-source ventilators, and that much work, policies, regulations, and funding would be needed for the open-source ventilators to achieve medical-grade standards. design requirements