HardwareX
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In this article, we introduce a portable and low-cost ventilator that could be rapidly manufactured, to meet the increasing demand of ventilators worldwide produced by COVID-19 pandemic. These ventilators should be rapidly deployable and with functional capabilities to manage COVID-19 patients with severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Our implementation offers robustness, safety and functionality absent in existing solutions to the ventilator shortage (i.e., telemonitoring, easy-to-disinfect, modularity) by maintaining simplicity. ⋯ The quality measurements obtained after testing on a calibrated artificial lung demonstrate repeatability and accuracy exceeding human capabilities of manual ventilation. The complete design files are provided in the supplementary materials to facilitate ventilator production even in resource-limited settings. The implementation of this mechanical ventilator could eliminate device rationing or splitting to serve multiple patients on ICUs.