As it has been really difficult to acquire Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) as of lately, medical staff are faced with greater risk while treating COVID-19 patients. In this situation, Daniel Halomoan Sihaloho, Information Technology student batch 2015 ran a project to produce PPE that would be distributed free of charge to medical teams in need. This project is called APDKita.
Daniel and other President University students, Michael Quinn (Mechanical Engineering 2015), Emmanuella Huang (International Relations 2016), Andhika Pratama (International Relations 2015), Felia Phang (International Relations 2016), and Marcella Lim (Accounting 2015) as the main team, began this project by opening opportunities for everyone to contribute funds, materials, or even by distributing information related to this project. So far, there have been 50 people who contributed to six companies as sponsors and collaborative partners, which help them as contributors in funding and forces, including President University.
Currently, the PPE mainly face shields produced by the students are being manufactured at the Mechanical Engineering Laboratorium of President University in Cikarang according to the international standard used by Prusa Face Shield Disinfection and have gone through sterilization process twice before being distributed. APDKita’s face shields have been distributed to a number of public health centers and hospitals in Bekasi Regency area.
“From the production capacity side, we will try to keep increasing the number of PPE production so we could distribute them to more places, more medical teams. For the time being, our production centers are located in Cikarang, Bekasi, Lampung, and Dairi,” Daniel explained.
Daniel and the team plan to invite other universities across Indonesia to collaborate in developing this project.