Fitbit, the company known for its fitness wearables, announced on Wednesday that it has received emergency use authorization (EUA) from the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) for a new emergency ventilator, which Fitbit designed in response to the COVID-19 global health crisis.An automatic resuscitator, Fitbit Flow was inspired by the MIT E-Vent Design Toolbox, and based on specifications for Rapidly Manufactured Ventilation Systems. Fitbit consulted with clinicians at Oregon Health...

Strategies to split ventilators to support multiple patients requiring ventilatory support have been proposed and used in emergency cases in which shortages of ventilators cannot otherwise be remedied by production or procurement strategies. However, the current approaches to ventilator sharing lack the ability to individualize ventilation to each patient, measure pulmonary mechanics, and accommodate rebalancing of the airflow when one patient improves or deteriorates, posing safety conce...

A 21-year-old Somali mechanical engineer has invented a homemade respirator to try to help his country during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The east African nation is suffering from a severe lack of respiratory equipment, which concerned Mogadishu-based Mohamad Adawe.

Previously, medical staff in Somalia have mainly had to assist patients' breathing by manually pumping the equipment. This has also brought them into close contact with the infected people, heightening the risk of con...

An Open Innovation Effort to Design a Rapidly Deployable Mechanical Ventilator


The CoVent-19 Challenge is an open innovation 8-week Grand Challenge for engineers, innovators, designers, and makers. We will be launching the Challenge on the GrabCAD Challenges platform on April 1, 2020. We welcome all who are interested to join a two round challenge that aims to create CAD assemblies by May 1, 2020 (Round 1: General Admission) and functional prototypes demonstrating acceptable perfor...

Nvidia Chief Scientist Bill Dally has released an open-source ventilator hardware design he developed in order to address the shortage resulting from the global coronavirus pandemic. The mechanical ventilator design developed by Dally can be assembled quickly, using off-the-shelf parts with a total cost of around $400 — making it an accessible and affordable alternative to traditional, dedicated ventilators, which can cost $20,000 or more.

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Researchers from the Respiratory biophysics and bioengineering IDIBAPS research group, the Biophysics and Bioengineering Unit of the University of Barcelona and the CIBERES have created a non-invasive low-cost ventilator, to support patients with respiratory diseases in areas with limited means. Researchers published the results of the study in the European Respiratory Journal together with open source technical features to build it.
Non-invasive ventilators are usually...

Their goal is to provide useful information to clinicians about helmet use for noninvasive ventilation in patients who have respiratory distress as a complication of the COVID-19 virus. Helmet-based ventilation saves lives, shortens ICU stays for patients who need mechanical ventilation and can be used on step-down units. In addition, it can be used for other patients who have different causes of respiratory distress.

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The engineers at NASA have developed a high-pressure ventilator prototype specifically tailored to help coronavirus patients, according to the agency.
It's called VITAL, or Ventilator Intervention Technology Accessible Locally. And after passing a critical test at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York earlier this week, NASA is hoping for fast-track approval of the ventilator in the coming days so it can be used to help coronavirus patients."We were very pleased ...

Abstract

AIM: Current pricing of commercial mechanical ventilators in low/middleincome 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 reducing the serious shortage of ventilators in LMICs. METHODS: The ventilator was built using off-the-shelf ma...

A group of teen girls in Herat, Afghanistan is working hard to design an affordable ventilator to treat COVID-19 coronavirus patients. 

The Afghan Girls Robotics Team of five girls aged 14 to 17 — Somaya Faruqi, Dyana Wahbzadeh, Folernace Poya, Ellaham Mansori, and Nahid Rahimi — are part of the Afghan Dreamers two-year program for high-achieving girls.




The Afghan Girls Robotics Team launched the project in respon...

Experts on cognition tell us that most people think they know more than they really do. One particular indicator for that is if someone is an expert in one field and they feel like all other fields relate to theirs (everything boils down to math or chemistry or physics, for example). This causes them to be overconfident on things they don’t actually know about. When it became clear that the current virus crisis might lead to a shortage of ventilators, many electronic experts set about to ...

Hospital de Sant Pau, the engineering company QEV Technologies,  the automobile company Nissan and the technology centre Eurecat have developed the Q-Vent respirator to be used in hospital ICUs to alleviate the lack of equipment generated by the Covid-19 throughout the world. Its design is intended to contribute to supplying emerging countries given its performance at the level of accessibility, flexibility and reliabil...