At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the healthcare industry faced a large-scale shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE), which put frontline workers at risk of infection. Wanting to help, machine builder and contract manufacturer Harbour Technologies Ltd. of Windsor, ON, designed and built a robotic cell to swiftly manufacture FDA-approved Level 2 and Level 3 isolation gowns, which helped the Canadian government provide more PPE to hospitals across the country. The cell was so successful that Harbour Technologies hopes to provide PPE not just to Canada—but to the rest of the world.
“It’s tremendously important for Canada to have resilience in manufacturing PPE,” says Andrew Glover, co-owner of Harbour Technologies. “We saw it -firsthand in the beginning of the pandemic, when there was a shortage of PPE across North America, especially in Canada.”