An Indian-American couple has developed the prototype of a low-cost portable emergency ventilator which will soon hit the production stage and help doctors in dealing with COVID-19 patients.
As per reports, DeveshRanjan, a professor and associate chair in the prestigious Georgia Tech’s George W Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and his wife Kumuda Ranjan, a practising family physician in Atlanta, developed the emergency ventilator from concept to prototype in just about three weeks time.
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The Open-AirVentGT ventilatoris now being developed into a real product by Singapore-based Renew Group, headed by Ravi Sajwan, an Indian-American from Uttarakhand.
The ventilator was designed to address acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), a common complication for COVID-19 patients which causes their lungs to stiffen, requiring their breathing to be assisted by ventilators.
It uses electronic sensors and computer control to manage key clinical parameters such as respiration rate, tidal volume (the amount of air moved into and out of the lungs during each cycle), inspiration and expiration ratio, and pressure on the lungs.
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The ventilator works by pneumatically compressing a BVM (Bag Valve Mask) assembly of the kind used in hospitals and carried in ambulances as resuscitation devices.
“The ventilator is envisioned for use outside the United States in countries that do not have significant medical infrastructure in place, and is designed to be produced for around $300,” Georgia Institute of Technology said in a statement.
“The new Georgia Tech device endeavors to make breathing more natural by allowing patients to trigger their own breaths instead of relying on a respiration rate pre-set in the device,” it added.