iFixit Just Published A Massive Medical Device Repair Database

At the moment, medical device repair is something that it's high demand because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, medical repair isn't always easy – much like device manufacturers who make our phones and laptops, the corporations that produce medical devices can sometimes make their repair information difficult to access, if that's something that's at all possible.

Though iFixit continues to push out its device teardowns, behind the scenes the company has been working to build out a medical equipment service database. It took half of iFixit's team two months to do this with the help of more than 200 volunteers, but the finished result is a collection of repair guides for a number of different medical devices, whether that's clinical and laboratory equipment or medical imaging devices and medical furniture.

In the end, the archive iFixit published today has over 13,000 manuals, so when iFixit says this was a lot of work, we certainly believe it. "This has been an absolutely massive undertaking — and we were fortunate to have the help and support of over 200 librarians and archivists from across the country," iFixit wrote today, adding that collectively, those volunteers contributed "thousands of hours" of their time to this new database.

iFixit also clarified that it isn't making money on these guides and is offering them free of advertising to the medical community. It also invited biomeds, community members, and medical device manufacturers to contribute to the database to make it even bigger than it is now.

So, it seems that iFixit has been hard at work over the past couple of months. It'll be interesting to see how big this database eventually grows, but even now, it seems like this will be a major help to hospitals that need to get medical devices repaired quickly so they can continue the fight against COVID-19.