OpenVenti – Ventilador Artificial OpenSource

About Openventi

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has collapsed the world’s health systems. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) report states that approximately 14% of infected people will present severe symptoms and another 6% will develop critical symptoms. This fact alone places countries whose healthcare system is unable to respond to the enormous demand placed by these severe and critical cases in a state of alert.

The ventilator or artificial respirator is one of the most needed medical devices for patients with respiratory failure, it helps patients breathe by introducing and extracting air from their lungs.

In Latin America, most hospital ventilators are imported. Therefore, fears of not having enough respirators to treat critical cases that will have dire consequences have raised an alert.

OpenVenti is a project integrating the efforts of individuals and organizations from the public and private sectors, all contributing with resources, infrastructure, knowledge, and experience, to establish a viable alternative for manufacturing ventilators for hospital use. These can be produced locally in Latin American countries currently facing difficulties in importing and having access to this device.

Objectives

Specific objectives include:

Generate open-source information. Manufacturing information for replicating this project in other parts of the world will be available.
Design a ventilator that is available throughout Latin American countries, taking into account existing local industrial limitations.
Establish a support process for various implementation and delivery methods.

Key Differentiator

Reliability, this is a robust product mechanically and electronically. This is achieved with an IoT YuBox Node board, this controller drives the electronics accurately managing air volume and the pressure generated by a medical-grade blower and other specialized sensors.

OpenVenti’s solution is overwhelmingly different from the emerging DIY solutions posted online and deemed as “War-time Medicine”. OpenVenti’s proposition is one of long duration and can be used in hospitals long after the current worldwide emergency.

Although this is a first-class product, one of the objectives is affordability. OpenVenti is targeting a mere cost of $450.00 USD, by contrast, other mechanical artificial respirators cost tens of thousands of dollars limiting its access to many. To achieve the set objectives the design team is applying these 3 strategies:

The Team

OpenVenti is a community made up of Spanish speaking professionals from all of the Americas, this is an initiative led by a group of Ecuadorian professionals and Academics with more than 200 members from different technical disciplines.

Community

It took only 48 hours for the project to gather more than 200 specialists from all over the world, actively collaborating through SLACK. You can access the platform by clicking on the link below.

Methodology

The project is developed over a team collaboration platform where a multi-discipline team with experience in research & development from the private and academic sectors collaborate in different technical realms.