Design and development of emergency ventilator

A. Background The novel COVID-19 is in the family of SARS and MERS coronaviruses and its implications include high fever, severe cough, difficulty breathing pneumonia, organ failure and death. This means that if the respiratory system fails, a patient will need an artificially breathing system and we can daily see, then number of victims is exponentially growing this will surely make some shortage in ventilators and manufacturers ( from rich countries) will be concentrated with saving first their countries this make African countries to not have access to ventilators. B. Goals and Objectives The main objective of this project is to design and develop an emergency ventilator which will support COVID-19 Patients in this pandemic period. However, this emergency ventilator can also be used in private or public hospitals and ambulances to save multitude of lives with breathing difficulties. Specific objectives are: • Design and develop the mechanic part. • Design and develop the control part. • Perform clinical testing parameters • Enhance technology integration in the health sector for rapid development of a more efficient and cost-effective healthcare service delivery system in Rwanda. • Train more biomedical engineers, enabling an environment for hands-on skills development and R&D capability in biomedical engineering and e-health. C. Methods For developing a ventilator, expertise from different field is required. For the first prototype the project gathers together electrical, mechanical and biomedical engineers the team also included some medical doctors to help for clinical concepts. Basically, the development of a ventilator follows 3 different concepts: • Clinical concept for the ventilator • Mechanical design for the ventilator • Control and electrical concept for a ventilator D. Expected outcomes At completion to the project, following are expected outcomes: • A certified emergency ventilator • More jobs which will be created, when it comes to mass production • Internship and training for students