Since the time, COVID-19 has surfaced, the entire world is suffering from the shortage of ventilators. These are respiratory aid machines which help the patients who find difficulty in breathing on their own. Such machines cost as much as about $30,000 each. Keeping this in mind, a team of engineers, physicians and computer scientists are working at MIT, to implement a safe and inexpensive alternative for emergency use.
The team was named as MIT E-Vent. The team members were brought together by the exhortations of doctors’ friends with a reference of a project done a decade ago, in the MIT. At that time, students working in consultation with local physicians designed a simple ventilator device that could be built within a price range of $100. They published a paper giving the details of its design.
Now as the world is in a great need of the device, a new team, which was linked to the course, has resumed the project at a great pace.
The team is particularly concerned about the potential for well-meaning but inexperienced, do-it-yourselfers, to try to reproduce such a system without the necessary clinical knowledge or expertise with hardware, that can operate for days. To help curtail the spread of misinformation or poorly-thought-out advice, the team has added to their website verified information resources on the clinical use of ventilators and the requirements of training and monitoring for using such systems. All of this information is freely available at e-vent.mit.edu.
