As lockdown hit in spring 2020, one young researcher in Switzerland put his doctoral project on hold, turning his skills instead to the problems of the pandemic. 

Alongside a team of designers, Julian Ferchow, 31, started to create a method for turning patients suffering from COVID-​19 in intensive care – a procedure that takes a lot of strength and can put a huge amount of strain on hospitals.

Within four weeks, they came up with the "Proning Taco," a revolutionary invention that Ferchow tells CGTN Europe is already being used to save lives and resources in coronavirus intensive care units.

Emergency response

"In the middle of March, everyone was seeing all these really horrible pictures in China and then Italy," says Ferchow. With thousands hospitalized and patient numbers growing, their response was to set up a product development initiative called Helpful ETH, aimed at providing medical centers with products that could be used in the face of the coronavirus. 

One of the first requests from the University Hospital Zurich, Ferchow says, was a way to rotate their coronavirus patients more efficiently.

Acute respiratory distress syndrome, one of the coronavirus's deadliest symptoms, requires patients to be turned on their front into the proning position so blood can flow to their lungs. However, manual turning takes a lot of strength, particularly in the case of overweight patients, with the process demanding a skilled team of five or six healthcare professionals.

"The big problem in universities and hospitals in general during the current crisis is a big bottleneck among the nurses and the doctors," says Ferchow. "They don't have enough capacity to care for the patients on the intensive care unit because they have to rotate them two times per day."

Priming the taco

The solution Ferchow and his team came up with was the Proning Taco. Digitally designed with many of its components 3D-printable, it allows healthcare staff to simply wrap two padded mattress around the patient – like a sandwich or a taco – and then use straps to turn them over. 

This design approach meant they were able to reduce the number of people needed to rotate a patient, from five to three – a 40 percent staff reduction. By using as little material and as few components as possible it is also highly cost effective.

"The taco itself was inspired by the wrapping functionality of how a sandwich works or how a product is packaged," says product designer Lorenzo Scazziga, who helped come up with the design. "I wanted to treat the patients almost like in a factory."

He adds: "It sounds brutal, but if you're faced with large numbers, you're going to have to industrialize [the process] somehow."

Free at the point of delivery

Now Scazziga's hope of industrializing the design has come to fruition, with the Taco set to be manufactured on a larger scale by Basel-based company OBA. After the pre-​production prototype was successfully put through its paces at University Hospital Zurich, the company made a few minor modifications and are soon set to offer the product to hospitals. 

Ferchow was delighted by the news and with his focus on progress over profit, the team decided not to file for a patent on the design – instead making it available to everyone free of charge. Hospitals from as far away as Asia are getting in touch about the design, with the team now hoping to land a global distribution partner.

Beyond the current pandemic, the team believes the design will continue to be a boon to hospitals. According to Gokula Englberger, a product development engineer on the team: "This Proning Taco system will also still be very useful after the pandemic stops, because turning people upside down needs to be done all the time."

Ferchow, who is now returning to his doctoral project, remains committed to the idea of such medically beneficial designs being available to all: "From the outset, our only goal was to make a difference and help society in the pandemic."

Video editor: Nuri Moseinco