Education
IFixit publishes a free repository of medical repair manuals
Best known as the leading provider of device teardowns, iFixit today announced that it has shifted much of its focus to even more pressing issues. For two months, approximately half of the site 's staff have been focusing on the creation of a medical repair database — one that has been labeled "the world's largest."
This includes more than 13,000 manuals from hundreds of companies available for free use by anyone. A good part of the do-gooder work, along with iFixit's own staff, was crowdsourced with the help of experts.
"This has been a massive undertaking — and we were lucky enough to have the help and support of over 200 librarians and archivists from across the country, says iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens in a post. Archivists from universities and public libraries, research institutes, insurance and software companies and, of course, biomedics themselves — all donated their valuable time. Collectively, they have contributed thousands of hours to organize piles of documents into a navigable, searchable system.
The site offers a long list of volunteers from a number of universities, libraries and even companies like LinkedIn. Pulling off such a project may have seemed an impossible task until recently, but the overtaxed medical system strained to manage the COVID-19 pandemic has caused many to get where they can.
IFixit states that the use of the database extends beyond COVID-19, but the need for such a tool is more important than ever in the current environment.
Image Credits: techcrunch.com
