Students Develop A Low-Cost Portable Ventilator: Mechanical Engineering

Students develop a low-cost portable
ventilator
15 July 2010
while only 100,000 are now in use.
The kind of ventilators used in modern hospitals

can cost up to $30,000, but the newly developed
device can be produced for about $100, says Abdul
Mohsen Al Husseini, a graduate student in
mechanical engineering and one of the students
who developed the system. While there are some
situations where it can’t perform all the same
functions as the more expensive versions, for 98
percent of cases, this simple inexpensive device
could do the job, he says.
A working prototype of the mechanical ventilator
developed by MIT students. They are working on a new “These manual devices are available everywhere,”
version designed for easy manufacturability and Al Husseini says. “Our approach is to adapt them,
maintenance. Photo: Patrick Gillooly since they’re already there.”
The simple system has a curved plastic cam that

compresses the device and then releases. It has
(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of students from MIT has just three control knobs; these adjust the total
devised a new low-cost ventilator to keep patients volume of air delivered in each breath, the number
breathing in places that lack standard mechanical of breaths per minute, and the ratio of time between
ventilators, or during times of emergency such as inhaling and exhaling.
pandemics or natural disasters, when normal
hospital resources may be overextended. They Al Husseini explains that the mechanical system
have designed a system that uses the same widely could not only eliminate the need for a person to
available manual pump — the same type used for operate the device manually in an emergency — it
the farmer in India. The new system encases the could also be safer. “There’s a danger, with
pump in a plastic box with a battery, motor and manual ventilation, of overpressurizing” the
controls to take the place of the manual patient’s lungs, which can cause serious damage,
compression process. he says. The new system includes a gauge that
stops the flow before the pressure gets too high.
There is a substantial need for such devices in
many developing nations, especially in rural areas
that have no access to existing ventilator
technology. Dr. Jussi Saukkonen of Boston
University Medical Center, who originally proposed
the concept of the low-cost ventilator and worked
with the MIT team, says that “it’s likely there
would be millions of cases worldwide” that could
benefit from such a device. In addition, a U.S.
government study in 2005 found that in a worst-
case pandemic scenario, this country alone might
need more than 700,000 mechanical ventilators,
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Graduate student Abdul al Husseini demonstrates the
features of the mechanical ventilator he and his fellow
students designed. Photo: Patrick Gillooly
The idea began as a class project in an MIT

mechanical engineering course called Precision
Machine Design, in which doctors from Boston-area
hospitals present problems awaiting solutions, and
the students choose which ones to address. A first
prototype was developed in that class, and some of
the students refined the design and produced a
second prototype in a follow-up class, Development
of Mechanical Products. They filed for a patent and
presented a paper on the system to the Design of
Medical Devices Conference in April of this year.
Now some of the students are preparing to do
further testing and develop the idea so it can be
licensed for manufacturing.
One of the students, Amelia Servi, traveled to

Nicaragua this summer to analyze the need for
such a device and how to bring it to market as a
real product, as part of her thesis research for her
master’s degree.
Provided by Massachusetts Institute of

Technology
APA citation: Students develop a low-cost portable ventilator (2010, July 15) retrieved 13 April 2020 from
https://phys.org/news/2010-07-students-low-cost-portable-ventilator.html
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Students develop a low-cost portable

while only 100,000 are now in use.

The kind of ventilators used in modern hospitals

The simple system has a curved plastic cam that

The idea began as a class project in an MIT

One of the students, Amelia Servi, traveled to

Provided by Massachusetts Institute of

Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

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