If the number of covid-19 patients in Belgium continues to rise, there may be a shortage of artificial respirators. A team of engineers at Vrije Universiteit Brussel’s FabLab Brussels has therefore started building and testing a simple ventilator. They started from a design by MIT, extended with sensors based on specifications from researchers at the UZ Brussel and Johns Hopkins University. Large-scale production is still premature. In the coming days and weeks, it will first have to be established whether the devices can actually be used in hospitals.