-
- Onintza Garmendia, Miguel A Rodríguez-Lazaro, Jorge Otero, Phuong Phan, Alexandrina Stoyanova, Anh Tuan Dinh-Xuan, David Gozal, Daniel Navajas, Josep M Montserrat, and Ramon Farré.
- Unitat de Biofísica i Bioenginyeria, Facultat de Medicina i Ciències de la Salut, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
- Eur. Respir. J. 2020 Jun 1; 55 (6).
AimCurrent pricing of commercial mechanical ventilators in low-/middle-income countries (LMICs) markedly restricts their availability, and consequently a considerable number of patients with acute/chronic respiratory failure cannot be adequately treated. Our aim was to design and test an affordable and easy-to-build noninvasive bilevel pressure ventilator to allow a reduction in the serious shortage of ventilators in LMICs.MethodsThe ventilator was built using off-the-shelf materials available via e-commerce and was based on a high-pressure blower, two pressure transducers and an Arduino Nano controller with a digital display (total retail cost <75 USD), with construction details provided open source for free replication. The ventilator was evaluated, and compared with a commercially available device (Lumis 150 ventilator; Resmed, San Diego, CA, USA): 1) in the bench setting using an actively breathing patient simulator mimicking a range of obstructive/restrictive diseases; and b) in 12 healthy volunteers wearing high airway resistance and thoracic/abdominal bands to mimic obstructive/restrictive patients.ResultsThe designed ventilator provided inspiratory/expiratory pressures up to 20/10 cmH2O, respectively, with no faulty triggering or cycling; both in the bench test and in volunteers. The breathing difficulty score rated (1-10 scale) by the loaded breathing subjects was significantly (p<0.005) decreased from 5.45±1.68 without support to 2.83±1.66 when using the prototype ventilator, which showed no difference with the commercial device (2.80±1.48; p=1.000).ConclusionThe low-cost, easy-to-build noninvasive ventilator performs similarly to a high-quality commercial device, with its open-source hardware description, which will allow for free replication and use in LMICs, facilitating application of this life-saving therapy to patients who otherwise could not be treated.Copyright ©ERS 2020.
Notes
Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
- Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as
*italics*
,_underline_
or**bold**
. - Superscript can be denoted by
<sup>text</sup>
and subscript<sub>text</sub>
. - Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines
1. 2. 3.
, hyphens-
or asterisks*
. - Links can be included with:
[my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
- Images can be included with:
![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
- For footnotes use
[^1](This is a footnote.)
inline. - Or use an inline reference
[^1]
to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document[^1]: This is a long footnote.
.