By Lalit K Jha
Atlanta, May 27, 2020: Prompted by the lack of adequate ventilators during the coronavirus pandemic, and Indian-American couple has developed the emergency ventilator from concept to prototype in just about three weeks-time.
Devesh Ranjan, the husband, is a professor and associate chair in the prestigious Georgia Tech’s George W Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering while his wife Kumuda Ranjan is a practicing family physician in Atlanta.
The low-cost portable emergency ventilator is soon to hit the production stage and will be available in India and the developing world to help doctors deal with the Covid-19 patients.
“If you can do a manufacturing of scale, it can be produced (item cost) in less than US$100. Even with a price point of US$500, they (the manufacturer) would have enough money to make sure that they are making enough profit in the market,” Professor Ranjan told PTI.
He said a ventilator of this type, on an average in the US, costs US$10,000.
Ranjan, however, clarified that theirs is not an ICU ventilator, which is more sophisticated and costs more.
This Open-AirVentGT has been developed to address acute respiratory distress syndrome, a common complication for COVID-19 patients which causes their lungs to stiffen, requiring their breathing to be assisted by ventilators, he said.
The ventilator developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology uses electronic sensors and computer control to manage key clinical parameters such as respiration rate, tidal volume, inspiration and expiration ratio, and pressure on the lungs.
Source: freepressjournal.in