A STUDENT from Worcester is part of a revolutionary campaign to help the fight against coronavirus in developing countries.

Jamie Waters has been part of a team designing a ‘ventilator splitter’ which will allow health services to use one ventilator to help up to four patients, easing some of the burden on hospitals.

The 16 year-old, who is studying at King’s in Worcester, has long been interested in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) and his first products came in 2018 when he started designing keyrings, vases and games.

He then progressed to designing a pill dispenser and is now co-designing the ventilator splitter with a team of engineers scientists from Britain and America.

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Jamie said: "It was during the first lockdown I was looking for a project and saw Adam Savage (the former Mythbusters presenter) calling for people to help out.

"I saw people making ventilators but that was much too more complex to get approved for me to do in such a short space of time."

Instead of this, seeing people printing parts for ventilators using 3D printers gave Jamie the idea to pitch a his ventilator splitter online.

Finding an online forum, he pitched his idea and became involved with creating and heading up the entire UK volunteer operation for the ventilator splitter project, known as Project Tetra.

A unique aspect of Tetra is that each patient gets an individually controlled airflow.

One of the features of the coronavirus lockdown has been the creativity boom, with people making all manner of innovative items and ways to pass the time.

Jamie added: "People have had time they wouldn't normally have had, so it has been amazing for volunteer projects such as Tetra.

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"A lot of our engineers are in the US and then I'm in the UK, but we are working with the majority are in the UK.

"I'm with 3D crowd (a community of 3D printers solving problems) and so we used their contacts to help with the prototype and to find out if it was something some of the different governments foreign countries could use"

The plan for the ventilator splitter in the long-term is to pitch it to developing countries, many of which have a severe lack of need as many ventilators as possible.

Helping people in the developing world is an "amazing feeling" according to Jamie, who added: "It is a really amazing feeling to use the skills I have to help other people."

Looking into the future, Jamie said he plans to go to university and study Chemistry, with the long term goal of tackling the climate crisis by making industrial processes more sustainable.

One such way is helping to find more eco-friendly ways of powering the world such as repurposing the animal waste used in farming to be less harmful to the planet's emissions.

Project Tetra has a Go Fund Me page where people can go to help fund the project.

For more information, go to https://www.gofundme.com/f/project-tetra-new-ventilator-splitters-Open-Source