Low-Complexity System and Algorithm for an Emergency Ventilator Sensor and Alarm

Abstract

In response to anticipated shortages of ventilators caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations have designed low-cost emergency ventilators. Many of these devices are pressure-cycled pneumatic ventilators, which are easy to produce but often do not include the sensing or alarm features found on commercial ventilators. This work reports a low-cost, easy-toproduce electronic sensor and alarm system for pressure-cycled ventilators that estimates clinically useful metrics such as pressure and respiratory rate and sounds an alarm when the ventilator malfunctions. A low-complexity signal processing algorithm uses a pair of nonlinear recursive envelope trackers to monitor the signal from an electronic pressure sensor connected to the patient airway. The algorithm, inspired by those used in hearing aids, requires little memory and performs only a few calculations on each sample so that it can run on nearly any microcontroller.

Construction and Performance Testing of a Fast-Assembly COVID-19 (FALCON) Emergency Ventilator in a Model of Normal and Low-Pulmonary Compliance Conditions

“…In order to preserve the "plug and play" characteristic of the prototype ventilator, the need to use standalone, modular monitors and devices with built-in alarms to alert the user of events such as a disconnection or insufficient tidal volume delivery-which are not widely used and may not be readily available-would be necessary to meet FDA recommended safety regulations (Corey et al, 2020;U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2020b).…”

Emergency ventilator for COVID-19

“…describes the alarm concept and its integration with RapidVent. A study on the algorithm development and mechatronic system design was published in a separate article [42]. Fig 8 shows the alarm and example data.…”

Pandemia Da Covid-19: Prospecção Bibliométrica E Patentária De Ventiladores Mecânicos Alternativos De Baixo Custo

“…Considerando as pesquisas científicas envolvendo os Estados Unidos percebe-se uma forte inclinação para o desenvolvimento de dispositivos alternativos de baixo custo, utilizando como parâmetro o sistema de máscara de válvula de bolsa (BVM) para a criação de ventiladores mecânicos, três artigos (ZUCKERBERG et al, 2020;FANG et al, 2020;PETSIUK et al, 2020), acessórios de sistema de alarme, um artigo (COREY et al, 2020), e equipamento para reduzir os índices de contaminação dos profissionais de saúde, um artigo (RAJAJEE; WILLIAMSON, 2020).…”

“…Visando cobrir este déficit, o estudo de COREY et al (2020) veio para atender a esta demanda ao desenvolver um acessório chamado Illinois RapidAlarm que tem a função de melhorar a funcionalidade de ventiladores de emergência cliclados a pressão. Vale salientar que estes componentes são encontrados habitualmente em ventiladores mecânicos mais complexos (COREY et al 2020).…”