Indo-US couple develops cheap portable ventilator

Washington, May 26: An Indian-American couple has developed a low-cost portable emergency ventilator which is soon to hit the production stage and will be available in India and the developing world to help doctors deal with the Covid-19 patients.

Prompted by the lack of adequate ventilators during the Covid-19 pandemic, Devesh Ranjan, a professor and associate chair in the prestigious Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and his wife Kumuda Ranjan, a practising family physician in Atlanta, developed the emergency ventilator from concept to prototype in just about three weekstime. “If you can do a manufacturing of scale, it can be produced (item cost) in less than $100. Even with a price point of $500, they (the manufacturer) would have enough money to make sure that they are making enough profit in the market,” Professor Ranjan said.

He said a ventilator of this type, on an average in the US, costs $10,000. A ventilator takes over the body’s breathing process when disease has caused the lungs to fail. This gives the patient time to fight off the infection and recover. Ranjan, however, clarified that theirs is not an ICU ventilator, which is more sophisticated and costs more.

This Open-AirVentGT has been developed to address acute respiratory distress syndrome, a common complication for Covid19 patients which causes their lungs to stiffen, requiring their breathing to be assisted by ventilators, he said.