UC researchers are part of a team that developed an emergency ventilator for “low-cost” intensive care

They are volunteers, all Portuguese and from various institutions, who got together and developed an emergency ventilator for intensive care with common industrial materials and components. Researchers from the University of Coimbra (UC) are part of the team that now presents a ventilator, in the proof of concept phase, which is available in open code and has a production value below the standard, they guarantee.

The team brings together, in the same project, doctors and engineers with the common goal of producing a low-cost emergency ventilator. And it all started by trying to “understand each other's difficulties and requirements and [first] look for something clinically acceptable in an emergency and simple way to implement”, explains Paulo Fonte.

"It is not a medical device", warns the researcher from the Laboratory of Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics (LIP) and from the Institute of Nuclear Sciences Applied to Health at the University of Coimbra (ICNAS). Paulo Fonte adds that the emergency ventilator developed by the team “is made with industrial components and that it will always have to be seen as something of last resort”.

The advantage? “Technical components are very common” and given its simplicity, it can be built “quickly and in large quantity” and with a value below the market standard of a medical ventilator. In a short time it will be possible to build thousands of samples, says the LIP researcher.

Paulo Fonte is one of the members of the multidisciplinary team that worked on this project within the Open Air Project. The team includes, in addition to LIP and ICNAS, NOVA's Faculty of Science and Technology, NOVA Medical School, Harvard University and “ two Portuguese engineers working for Formula 1 teams”.

In the proof of concept phase, the emergency ventilators for intensive care presented now have the design in the public domain, which means that, according to Paulo Fonte, “anyone in the world can use it without any restriction”.

^{Translation by Diana Taborda}