helpfulETH
Engineering solutions to help health care in the face of COVID-19
a pdz-born initiative goes Swiss-wide
helpfulETH was founded in March 2020 as an initiative by the ETH Domain and Swiss academia. Its aim is to place the expertise of Swiss academia and Swiss industrial partners at the disposal of the Swiss health care system in order to offer as much support as possible to tackle COVID-19. While the emergency-driven part of helpfulETH's activities was phased out during June 2020, helpfulETH is currently run by a "hibernation team", making the initiative available in the event of a (hopefully not occurring) second wave. Some of our projects are continued as long-term research projects.
helpfulETH operates as a point of contact, matching needs of health care providers with project teams who work on quick and implementable solutions. The project teams consist of volunteers from the broad array of the ETH domain’s network. Volunteers have widely varying skill-sets, as they are engineers, scientists, researchers, doctors, legal specialists and many more.
The initiative helpfulETH started as an idea by the Feasibility Lab for Healthcare Innovation, located at pdz and founded by Prof. Mirko Meboldt (Chair of Product Development and Engineering Design) together with Prof. Detlef Günther (Vice President for Research and Corporate Relations) at ETH Zurich in January 2020.
As the first still subtle signs of COVID-19 reached Switzerland, the Feasibility Lab reached out to Universitätsspital Zürich, realizing the need to support health care stakeholders in this possible challenge. Students and researchers at pdz started to put together outlines for a project structure. Simultaneously, other institutions within the ETH Domain launched similar initiatives. While the extent of the COVID-19 situation increased, health care providers also began reaching out.
It became clear that the best way forward was to join forces: Professors at EPFL instantly showed their full support. Prof. David Atienza Alonso (Director of the Section of EE (SEL) and Head of Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL) at the School of Engineering) takes the leading role in coordinating the initiative helpfulETH from the EPFL-side, also connecting to the initiatives already taken by EPFL.
Within 1-3 weeks, the first of helpfulETH's solutions were being used in hospitals. The reception has been one of great appreciation among burdened healthcare personnel.
You can find more information about helpfulETH's solutions on the homepage.
helpfulETH is part of the external pageSwiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force.
