Ventilator Improvement Systems for Readily Available Advanced Ventilator Designs

Project Goal: Improve the performance of current low-cost ventilators by designing a mechanical ventilator from readily available materials and implementing an advanced control system to adjust and monitor clinical data.

Healthcare professionals and medical facilities are overrun with an increasing number of COVID-19 patients who needed sophisticated, extremely costly mechanical ventilators. Makeshift, low-cost ventilators designed by engineers around the world did not meet the demand due to expense and the short supply of medical-grade components.

This design mitigates those issues by using everyday household materials, such as a ball for an air reservoir and a rolling toolbox as a mode of portability. An advanced control system monitors air flow and pressure to the patient during the breathing cycle, which can be read on the graphical display. The ventilator also features a two-arm design that operates as the squeezing mechanism to deliver air to the patient. A motor and a set of adjustable clinical parameters control the device.