At the peak of the Covid-19 outbreak in Italy last spring, doctors and health care professionals were faced with harrowing decisions. Hospitals were running out of ventilators, forcing doctors to choose which patients had the best chance of survival, and which didn’t. “It was a very difficult time for Italy,” recalls Daniele Vivona, a mechanical engineering graduate student from Italy. In early March, Vivona and a team of researchers at MIT’s Electrochemical Energy Lab (EEL) started to devise a plan to develop an oxygen concentrator that might one day help…
