Fitz-Thors Engineering Inc. created an intubation box, shown here, to keep medical professionals safe from COVID-19.
Arnar Thors, co-owner and president of Fitz-Thors Engineering, Inc., didn’t expect his company’s next invention to come from a conversation with his neighbor.
The neighbor – an anesthesiologist that performs intubation procedures for COVID-19 patients – told Thors the process of inserting an endotracheal tube through a patient’s mouth and into the airway before a patient can be put on a ventilator is extremely hazardous to health care providers because of infection exposure.
The wheels began spinning and, after seeing a similar box created in Asia, within two days Thors’ team at the engineering company developed an intubation box device that shields medical staff from scatter caused by the procedure, a robust solution that can hold up to day-to-day use in hospitals.
Fitz-Thors serves the manufacturing industry with expertise in areas like process automation, robotics, custom equipment, product design and development, and more. And the pandemic has it leaning into a sweet spot of using product design to create what no one has created before.
“For COVID specifically, it comes down to providing solutions for products that don’t exist yet,” Thors said. “This is a brand-new disease we know very little about, and it’s important to have someone like us rapidly take a need and a problem and develop a solution for it, going from idea to full prototype of a commercial product very quickly.”
Once the Fitz-Thors team designed the initial device, Thors gave it to his neighbor to try out on the job. After making some tweaks, the Fitz-Thors team finalized the product and is currently pushing it out to more health care providers now that the design is refined.
The company also created vehicle isolation pods, or VIPs, for the back seat of ridesharing cars, keeping vehicles completely disinfected between rides and allowing drivers to continue earning an income.
“That one was a very challenging design of taking something that needs to be mounted into someone’s vehicle but can’t permanently attach or damage someone’s vehicle and must leave no signs of being installed,” Thors said.
So far, the patent-pending VIPs have been installed in six vehicles, with five more scheduled to be installed imminently.
The company, which was founded in 2007 in Birmingham by Thors and co-owner Matt Fitzgerald and employs 40, offers multiple divisions within the company to handle different segments, from engineering to controls and automation to strictly machining manufacturing. But it is its product development arm that has been flexed most heavily during COVID-19, Thors said.
“At the end of the day, we realize this needs to be done,” Thors said. “We are taking all safety precautions we can but are also realizing we do need to provide these solutions to help people stay safe. Our ability to control everything in-house and rapidly go through the design, manufacturing and testing process is what makes us unique.”