IBM and Coronavirus stories

Cait Crawford: Helping to Save Lives with Found Objects

Fifty years ago this month, the lives of the astronauts aboard Apollo 13 depended on quick thinking, seat-of-the-pants ingenuity and the commitment that failure was not an option. Mission Control tasked engineers from IBM and other companies to devise a life-saving solution for the hobbled spacecraft, using only items available to the astronauts in space. They succeeded.

The crisis facing today’s healthcare workers is no less critical. To save lives threatened by COVID-19, doctors, nurses, EMTs, firefighters, police and other first responders need to protect their own lives. But doing so has been tragically difficult because of the shortage of personal protective equipment, or PPE, including the N95 respiratory masks that can protect lifesavers from the deadly airborne virus.

Once again, it is time for agile thinking, smart ideas and a commitment to success. And Distinguished Engineer and newly appointed IBM Fellow Catherine (Cait) Crawford is helping to coordinate a community effort to help healthcare workers on the front lines protect themselves in the process.

More than 100 citizens of Crawford’s small city of Bedford, New Hampshire (population 20,000) are working together to source, package and deliver N95 masks to area healthcare providers. Crawford is using whatever she can find—window seal gaskets, glue sticks, elastic strips, pieces of HVAC filters—to create the masks, as well as 3D printers at a local high school and community DIYers to fabricate the frames.

“Both of my sisters are nurses—one in community health, the other in the ICU—so the crisis of supplying these masks is personal to me. I’m an engineer, so I searched online to see what other engineers were doing to support the fight against the virus,” Crawford says. “I found some plans for 3D printing for N95 masks and started to make them with whatever I could scrounge.”

Crawford asked a physician friend to try out one of her masks. In the meantime, she continues working with her three children (ages 15, 18 and 19) and fellow engineer husband, who have joined the DIY community effort to work on other needed essentials like ventilators and intubation boxes.

She said she hopes that these masks are never needed but sees the silver lining in this project will be an inspiration to girls to study STEM, because they can see firsthand how engineering and ingenuity can have a positive impact on peoples' lives.

At IBM Research, Crawford is focused on harnessing the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence on edge appliances. And, in the fight against the coronavirus, she’s working with IBM’s high-performance computing team and IBM Research scientists in Kenya on a COVID-19 decision dashboard.

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