I am volunteering with a team of medical instrument designers at the College of Engineering, Pune (CoEP) to help attempt to address some of the technological requirements of the current COVID-19 crisis. This team, headed by Dr. Sandeep Anasane is in deep collaboration with doctors at B.J. Medical College/ Sasoon Hospital, Pune. I have been extremely lucky to get access to this team and be made comfortable to work with. Because of this, i can work at will at the college and roam about in the city which the city is in lockdown, all thanks to some official permissions the team members have got.
I have come across many others like myself, who wish to contribute technologically in any way, but are at a loss as to how. The problems they are facing:
- Lack of mobility due to nationwide restrictions to movement.
- Lack of know-how as to where is the specific need that needs to be helped.
As of the former part, here’s a probably way that can work:
- Contact a your local good doctor / hospital.
- Offer your design and engineering services to their ventilator and other on field needs.
- If they agree, team-up with them and pursue permission from the government authorities to travel and begin making stuff.
- Make and test.
- Share with the world with test results (failure is OK, at least the world will know what design does not work).
Now to the second part, what to do? Its hard to know what is actually needed on the field. The medical staff may be too caughtup to sit and talk to anyone about possible future devices that could help a current crisis situation. They wont have time to convert their experiences into articlately worded challenges that could be spread around. So what comes out and is received by amateurs like me are only the more pressing problems – like the ventilators. This is just because everyone is talk about it, from the political leaders to the media to the local doctors on the field. However, i am sure a lot many problems are to be solved which sadly are not coming up to our notice.
Anyways, thanks to my immense luck ( credit to Mr. Vijay Kumar of Texol Eng., my long time mentor and friend) i could get involved with a team already working on the ventilator problem. So here i will just list what i have understood about the current crisis.
The low cost ventilator challenge
- Why is it needed? – Simple answer, not enough high grade ventilators available for the current crisis of COVID-19 which causes respiratory difficulties.
- What’s the role of a ventilator – pump air into the patient in a controlled manner because the patient can’t breath properly on his/her own.
- So what are the basic features a ventilator has:
- There’s a bag of air that needs to be pushed into the patient. This is a mechanical requirement, like using a motor or piston.
- The air that needs to be pushed in needs often to be modified by adding pure oxygen.
- The pumping action must match breathing requirements of the patient, so there are rules and guidelines of pumping.
- When the above requirements are converted into an engineered products, the following features will constitute what makes a real basic ventilator :
- Should be an add-on to existing Bag Valve Mask system.
- Should be able to control volume of air / breath.
- Should be able to control breaths per minute.
- Should be able to control Inhalation:Exhalation time ratio.
- Should withstand at minimum 3-4 days of failure free operation.
- Should pass 8 days of continuous testing on artificial test lungs.
- Additional features could be added :
- Measure O2% in delivered air.
- Measure volume flow rate and pressure of delivery.
- Remotely controllable with wifi.
So thats it, a small note on the requirements of a ventilator. Now the question arises, if one gets all permissions to travel and make ventilators, and has understood the above requirements of the end-device what and how should one begin?
- One could begin by reverse engineering existing ventilator designs.
- One could use one’s experience to make an engineering jig that could solve the above challenge list.
- One could learn new skills and advanced techniques to solve the above problem.
- One could just design new ways to solving the above challenge list but leave the testing to others.
The above ways are perfectly fine, and in the normal world all these are used extensively. My point here is that its not a normal world now. We are in a crisis. And the crisis is as follows – we the engineers have learnt our tools very well by investing thousands of manhours into learning and using these. These tools have become our vocabulary with which we think. For example a lathe machinist will probably come up with a very different design as compared to a laser cutter tool engineer, just because one uses what one knows. Similarly, as a product designer i am used to order circuits and modules and parts online. I am also used to visiting the market and augmenting up my library of parts/products/etc in my head. I can consult the internet and there is big chance that i can get those parts discussed in far of places right here in Pune, thanks to online e-commerce websites, money transactions, etc. So like every other person, used to using the tools we all probably know, i realized how useless my ways of product development was at the present situation when none of the mobility, access to workshops, online ordering etc is possible.
Long story short, we need to be resourceful. Rather than beign stuck with our past vocabulary we need to shift all gears and levers into a super learning mode. We need to unlearn, so that there is space for new learning to play out. So here are the new design constraints for this ventilator project:
- Reliable: Make it so sure that there wont be a chance that the design fails a trusting patient to death or added breathing complications.
- Low cost – so that everyone and anyone can use it.
- Mass manufacturable – we need 1000s of these now. But we cant depend on conventional supply chains. These must be locally manufacturable without dependency on imported components, etc.
- Manufacturable with minimal skills – because experienced workforce may not be available to make these in mass numbers. Learning to make one should not be difficult.