Something Labs

Something Labs is a distributed volunteer coalition who protects frontline medical workers by quickly innovating and bridging gaps between supply chains and medical systems. After all, we all have to do something. We’re health workers, engineers, designers, machinists, logisticians, and just everyday people who fight COVID-19 together. Due to shortages in available medical Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), we add value by prototyping and sharing designs, manufacturing PPE, and distributing it to small health organizations in need. This began with a friend and a face shield. A physician walks home and shares photos of what her colleagues had for protection in the hospital. A hair tie knotted around a folder divider. A coke bottle cut in two. They are the types of photos that by now we’ve seen over and over again in the news. And like many, we joined in the fight to protect health workers to keep them in the front lines and avoiding infection wherever possible. Each challenge has led to the next. How do you make a face shield re-usable? How do you make many of them when plastic availability keeps shifting? Can you reverse engineer a CAPR lens? Is it possible for an intubation box to be more flexible? The challenge is high, but the goal is to join wherever possible. We hope to help in the in-betweens, and help larger manufacturing come back online to meet the need. We now not only create designs and manufacture NIH approved PPE, but we connect with hospitals and distribute critical products directly to their docks. So far we've distributed over face shields and PAPR shield replacements. All of it comes from every day waking up with the same recurring thought: “Can’t we do something?”