The new device is intended for places where traditional devices are unavailable.
Grant Kahl is a freshman in electrical engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Kahl is home in San Antonio, Texas, during the COVID-19 pandemic and he decided to do what engineers do best and build something. That something is a low-cost ventilator designed to be used in places where traditional medical equipment cannot be used or is not accessible to everyone.
Kahl teamed up with a high school classmate, and the two made a prototype P-Vent in about 24 hours. Seeing that it was possible, they pulled together a team of some other students and Kahl’s father, who is a chemist, forming Kepler Enterprises LLC.
A little over two weeks and 400 hours later, the team was able to build the ventilators for under $500—$150 of that was materials costs.
Courtesy of Kepler Enterprises (YouTube)
The low-cost ventilator is based around a valve mask called an Ambu bag, which is a manual resuscitator used to help patients unable to breathe independently. According to Kahl, it has both mandatory and responsive breathing modes, and "can produce volumes up to 1000 mL, provide breaths at rates up to 60 breaths per minute, and has variable inspiratory/expiratory ratio from 1:1 to 1:4."
Kepler Enterprises was able to get a ventilator calibration unit to test the system from a family friend at Joint Base San Antonio’s Medical Education and Training Campus.
“Right now, everyone is producing these units and they’re just basic compression units. They’re just forcibly squeezing air. But there’s a lot of research coming out that that’s not going to help solve the problem,” Kahl said. “What we did as a team is ask, how can we make this more responsive to the individual? We were able to integrate responsive breathing into our system, with a pressure trigger that can indicate when the patient is trying to breathe. We can actually detect when the patient is breathing and have the machine respond, to preserve their lungs, and increase their chance of survival," wrote the Mines Newsroom.
Kahl says it was a learning experience, very different than other projects he has worked on. He has a history of working with underwater robotics and has gone to competitions for just that, but has never worked on a medical-grade device before. He describes it as a "dream come true" if the device is produced and put in the field to help people and make a difference.
You can see the team in action in this video shared to YouTube:
Kepler Enterprises consists of team members:
- Grant Kahl - Lead Engineer
- Eric Love - Lead Programmer
- Jeffery Kahl, Ph.D. - Project Manager
- Jason Love - Fabrication and Communications
- Nate Love - Electrical and Technical Writing
- Christopher Weeks - Programmer
- Dylan Watson - Programmer
- Jake Love - Safety
There are a lot of people just like Kahl and his team who have stepped up and tried to find ways to help fight the coronavirus pandemic. For Kahl and his team, this may be the start of a whole new line of interest.
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