Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: In response to anticipated shortages of ventilators caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations have designed low-cost emergency ventilators. Many of these devices are pressure-cycled pneumatic ventilators, which are easy to produce but often do not include the sensing or alarm features found on commercial ventilators. This work reports a low-cost, easy-to-produce electronic sensor and alarm system for pressure-cycled ventilators that estimates clinically useful metrics such as pressure and respiratory rate and sounds an alarm when the ventilator malfunctions. A low-complexity signal processing algorithm uses a pair of nonlinear recursive envelope trackers to monitor the signal from an electronic pressure sensor connected to the patient airway. The algorithm, inspired by those used in hearing aids, requires little memory and performs only a few calculations on each sample so that it can run on nearly any microcontroller.
Authors: Ryan M. Corey, Evan M. Widloski, David Null, Brian Ricconi, Mark A. Johnson, Karen C. White, Jennifer R. Amos, Alexander Pagano, Michael L. Oelze, Rachel D. Switzky, Matthew B. Wheeler, Eliot B. Bethke, Clifford F. Shipley, Andrew C. Singer
Language: English
Subfield: Biomedical Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,045
Funders: U.S. Department of Energy, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program, NIH Office of the Director, Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
OpenAlex ID: W3033114160