UC Davis Engineers, Clinician Develop Low-Cost, Portable Ventilator
By Andy Fell on April 29, 2020
"Engineers at the University of California, Davis, are working with clinicians to create a simple, inexpensive ventilator. They have developed a prototype and plan to make plans freely available online. Versions could be in clinical use in about six months.
'This is a critical device to have. It provides the vital functions of a ventilator while being completely portable,” said Andrew Li, assistant professor in the Department of Surgery at UC Davis Health.
The device, named 'AmbuBox,' is based on the ambu-bag, a handheld ventilation device. Squeezing the bag by hand pushes air into a patient’s lungs.
There is a gap between the handheld ambu-bag and expensive ventilators used in intensive care units, said Tingrui Pan, professor of biomedical engineering at UC Davis. One attempt to fill this gap is MIT’s E-VENT project, but this device involves a number of mechanical moving parts."