The global shortage of ventilators needed to treat severe cases of COVID-19 has led companies like Dyson, Apple, and Ford to create innovative new products to meet hospital demands. An innovative team in Maryland is joining the effort and creating ventilator prototypes out of breast pumps.
The team of four engineers is working out of the University of Maryland’s TechPort incubator. The new design reverses the airflow of the devices so they push air out, rather than sucking it in. The devices are also easily adaptable for hospital use as they are sanitize-able biomedical devices already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Additionally, each device takes only four hours to assemble into a functional ventilator prototype and costs only $300. To compare, hospital-grade ventilators can cost thousands of dollars each.
The researchers have been advertising their project on Facebook and are accepting money, breast pumps, and Arduino circuit board donations via email at breastpumpvent@gmail.com.
The product will need authorization from the FDA before officially implementing the design in medical settings, but for now, the engineers are consulting pulmonologists to perfect the design and test it in a biomedical simulation laboratory.
