Professors and students develop a cheap and easy to assemble ventilator to help in the fight against Covid19

In just one week, a team at Oxford University and King’s College London built a simple ventilator, the OxVent, that could help the fight against Covid19.

Andrew Farmery academic at the University of Oxford and consultant anaesthetist explained that the design had come out of what the clinicians want. The Medicines and Healthcare Product Regulatory Agency (MHRA) specification was quite high but he said there is no need for anything that complicated or high spec. “We just need a basic bit of kit that gets the job done and saves lives, and we need it within two weeks otherwise the body count will be huge.”

The OxVent is a compressible squeezy bag trapped inside a rigid Perspex box. Compressed air is injected in the rigid Perspex box that squeezes this bladder and pushes air out through some valves, and inflates the patient’s chest. There is a second set of valves to allows gas to come out of the patient’s chest and of the Perspex box. The electronic of this ventilator is based on Arduino.

The difference of OxVent is that it uses the basic principle used in a simple operating theatre ventilator but it doesn’t use any of the same components. “It has basically repurposed all sorts of different components that are already in the NHS supply chain – bits of tubing for this, breathing valves for that and bags for this and the other. None of them is ordinarily used to make a ventilator.”

“We’ve got this within a week without really asking, so if it’s co-ordinated and HM government puts its weight behind it, I think it could just be massive. It’s a simple, IKEA-type ventilator. We could supply people with a box of parts and say: Just assemble it.”

Adapted from: https://theface.com/life/oxvent-prototype-ventilator-health-nhs-covid-19

More information: https://oxvent.org/