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ApolloBVM: Automated, Add-On Solution to Bag Valve Masks for COVID-19 Patients

A team at Rice University has developed an automated bag valve mask ventilation unit that can be built for less than $300 in parts, and help patients in treatment for COVID-19. The device could reduce the load on existing ventilators, to help people who are in respiratory distress but not at a critical stage. The ApolloBVM  is a controllable, automated add-on solution to the pre-existing and widely available Bag Valve Mask (BVM). The device compresses the BVM with a mechanical system that is able to provide consistent and accurate ventilation with positive-pressure. The current prototype employs a dual rack-and-pinion mechanical design converting rotational motion of motors into translational motion for bag compression. The ApolloBVM is replicable with off-the-shelf electronics, 3D printed components, and protective casing. The plans to build the unit are freely available online here  .

Topics:
Manufacturing & Prototyping Medical Motion Control

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    Transcript

    00:00:01 [Music] we're working on an automated bag-valve-mask device that is going to provide the ability to mechanically stimulate these readily available bag-valve-mask s-- which are available in most hospitals in wide supply and this device will mechanically compress this to reduce the burden on human operators who might have to compress

    00:00:29 this bag for hours at a time this is not a high-tech device that requires a lung doctor or pulmonologist to set this is a device that could reduce the load on existing ventilators to basically help people who are in respiratory distress but not at a critical case when you mechanize that motion you put sensors along that that mimic the respiratory

    00:00:54 cycle that turns it into something very unique and you get essentially all of the functionality of a full ventilator especially with sensors and safeguards which is what we've done at Rice now another beautiful part of this relationship between medical doctors and engineers at Rice University is that we have end-to-end clinician input from day one the project was a clinician LED at

    00:01:16 all critical engineering touch points there was a clinical input and the final product and the final prototypes are going to be used by people like me in the emergency room and the intensive care units where people are actually getting intubated I do the intubations myself I know exactly what I need for that and this device fits into that family very nicely and flows very well

    00:01:36 too every kind of ventilator right now is in short supply just due to the the needs of severe coronavirus patients and so from my perspective as a robotics guy it's just a robot that squeezes something so it's super controllable if we build it correctly we can have really good control and fidelity of how we actually provide air to somebody similar

    00:02:01 to a real ventilator not quite the same those things cost like 10 grand the idea is that roughly the same the kind of a pressure through someone's airway but we're using off-the-shelf components we can order the biggest challenge we have is what parts do we have available to us so typically a team will have you know months to do this though order parts the design for a week or two or do the parts

    00:02:27 to come in maybe a week later and then they keep reiterating we have maybe hours in some cases so we're trying to recreate parts but the probably the other biggest challenge would be this has to be openly readily available things that's the whole idea behind this whole concept so solving a problem that a you know multi-thousand dollar ventilator can do but doing it in less

    00:02:48 than three hundred dollars is a bit of a challenge especially at times like this when we don't have the resources that even you know anybody would have normally it's been really helpful with the state of things to have this distraction because it is it's keeping us busy and it's also keeping us very focused so that we can help in some way we all wanted to help we weren't sure

    00:03:09 how we could and when this project came our way it was a way that we were able to help using the resources that the austra engineering design kitchen has yeah we were gonna make an adapter to go in between and this this sizer see how this thing goes into this this device is hospital grade and you'll see a lot of me two things out there I want people to know that when rice and

    00:03:31 teams of doctors come together to build things they don't just build bare-bones versions they build versions that are high-grade high quality and trust me and whatever you see come out you can trust that product from Rice University I think and that's why I'm really proud of this partnership because over the last decade working with the rice folks we have seen that we have engineered a

    00:03:54 portfolio of devices for low resource settings across the world and it's really made a difference across many people's lives and it's sort of far flung across the world people don't know that these devices came from rice partnerships which is really lovely to know we can keep pushing that forward [Music] [Music]

    00:04:22 you