Mass Casualty Ventilation Monitoring

The viral pandemic we are facing (COVID-19) has pointed out that in the wake of a virulent flu strain, patients with survivable illness will die from lack of resources unless more ventilators are made available. Hospitals have almost no reserve ventilators to respond to disaster or pandemic. Critical-care ventilators are complex and their high cost makes it impossible to stockpile them, so simple, low-cost, ventilators are the only suitable solution at the moment. Because of their technical simplicity, the performance of such ventilator is highly impacted by patient'Äôs pulmonary characteristics which could cause either hypoventilation or hyperventilation resulting in severe lung injuries and death. The important difference between these disaster ventilators and advanced emergency ventilators is the absence of alarms for undesirable events (disconnection, ventilation failure, O2 consumption'Ķ), which is, of course, a major patient-safety issue. The use of such ventilators would therefore be strongly conditioned by the possibility to monitor ventilation parameters. Archeon has recently developed a medical device that provides caregivers with ventilation monitoring and real-time feedback on the quality of ventilation given to cardiac arrest patients. The system has been tested successfully in different mass casualty incident simulation scenario and has proven a drastic improvement of ventilation quality (75%). The aim is now to develop and implement the first independent monitoring system dedicated to mechanical ventilation at a very low-cost so that it could massively equip every hospital and care centre in the event of mass casualty incident or viral pandemic. This technology could save a very large number of lives as was demonstrated that avoiding hyperventilation decreases mortality from 34.1% to 19.6% in the intensive care unit. With the necessary resources, the project can be completed very quickly as Archeon already has all the know-how and technology available.