Recent medical crises in Haiti and Chile point to the need for low-end urgent care devices.

British anesthesiologists have developed a range of low-cost ventilator prototypes to provide life-saving support during health care emergencies involving high patient volume.

Consultant anesthesiologist Dr. John Dingley of Morriston Hospital, Swansea, teamed with researchers to design and test three prototype low-cost, gas-efficient, pneumatic ventilators "readily manufactured in bulk at low cost, or even as disposable single-use items to prevent cross-infection." The devices, detailed in a paper in the medical journal Anaesthesia, are "ideally suited for use wherever resources are limited (e.g. developing countries, remote locations, military usage), and for the management of mass casualties and victims of a respiratory pandemic," researchers write.
Dingley explains, "I had this inspiration to design a ventilator from scratch that was portable -- that was the overriding concept, and it went through several variations." He notes the cost of industrial materials to produce the devices "for use where oxygen is available at 2-4 bar, with no pressurized air or electrical requirements" could be as low as GBP200 ($319.19), a staggering drop from critical care ventilators which are more expensive and complex to operate.

The prototypes require lower oxygen consumption than gas-powered ventilators currently available in commercial markets. This is in-part because researches took a simplistic approach to designing the technology to ensure the devices could be reproduced in mass quantities in preparation for medical crises. "The idea is to take the earliest ventilators, which were very simple, and revisit lost expertise with a modern twist," he explains. "You don't need much to make a ventilator that will keep someone alive and that's the principle of the machine -- it's minimalistic. What's happened over the years as companies compete with each other is electronics and computer control systems have entered these machines and now they are very expensive machines with all sorts of alarm systems and they use quite a lot of gas. This is great for a western society but (our research) is really about how to provide a lot of ventilators very quickly."

Dingley points out the device does not replace intensive care ventilators, noting the complexities of these commercial machines are necessary to provide optimal care for patients unable to breathe without assistance. "If you have power cut off in the hospital it (the prototype) would still work," he says, "but it doesn't do anything clever or sophisticated as far as ventilators are concerned."

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