Hospitals all over the country are struggling with shortages on ventilators, but Makers have been working on a solution since before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. Speeding up their progress on a project from March 2019, a team at Rice University developed an automated bag valve mask ventilation unit comprised of parts that would cost less than $300 and which can be used to help in the treatment of non-critical COVID-19 patients, while freeing up use of standard ventilators for critical patients.
The project started a year ago, lead by a team of engineering students (now Rice alumni). The project is called “Take a Breather,” and the team designed and created a programmable device that can squeeze a bag valve mask named the ApolloBMV. Recently, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, the team brought this device up to medical grade through the help of engineers at Rice and doctors from Texas Medical Center.
Bag valve masks, known as a BMV device, are often carried by emergency medical personnel to help get air into the lungs of people having difficulty breathing on their own. However, BMV devices can be physically laborious for the emergency worker to squeeze by hand for more than a few minutes at a time, and are therefore usually only intended for short-term manual operation.
The team is part of the Rice University Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (ODEK), and worked together primarily using 3D-printed and laser-cut parts to develop a more well-rounded prototype. They developed a reconfiguration of the original rack-and-pinion device, and designed it to be medical grade—but also to be inexpensive enough to be considered disposable.
Currently, the prototype uses an Arduino board to facilitate the programming that allows users to adjust the rate of air delivery to the lungs of patients depending on their condition. However, the team expects a custom integrated circuit will eventually be available at a lower cost to replace the Arduino board. Their device will eventually also employ feedback sensors that help fine-tune the flow of air to the lungs, as well as motors of the same type that power 3D printers.
Within the documentation of the project, the team labels ApolloBMV as a “high-acuity limited-operability (HALO) ventilator solution with an a priori design to produce volume- and pressure-cycled ventilation that includes positive end-expiratory pressure and the inclusion of enriched oxygen sources.”
Dr. Rohith Malya, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, and an assistant professor of bio-engineering at Rice, recognized the need to automate the masks not only for emergencies where hospital ventilators are in short supply but also for developing nations where advanced equipment is not available at all. The collaboration plans to share details of the ventilators to be freely accessible to anyone in the world. The goal of the ApolloBMV is to keep the noncritical COVID-19 patient stable in order to free up larger ventilators for the more critical patients, mentioned Amy Kavalewiz, executive direction of OEDK.
“This is a clinician-informed end-to-end design that re-purposes the existing BVM global inventory toward widespread and safe access to mechanical ventilation,” Dr. Malya quotes, noting that more than 100 million bag valve masks are manufactured around the world each year.
To stay current, and up to date on the ApolloBMV project, it is available here: ApolloBMV.