VENTILATOR IN A PINCH
Simple items may save lives
Two Alberta professors say the medical ventilator they’ve assembled from household items could breathe life in a pinch.
The two have combined a high-powered vacuum cleaner with hoses, a bucket and other readily-accessible parts to roughly simulate the life-saving devices so crucial to treating the effects of the respiratory pathogen sweeping the planet.
“It’s stuff you can get at Canadian Tire or Home Depot,” said Mike Lipsett, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Alberta.
Said his University of Calgary colleague Dr. Mark Ungrin: “There are some concerns about shortages of equipment, so this is looking at what kind of ventilator system could be built in large quantities very quickly.”
The negative pressure ventilation system feeds into a polyethylene shell cocooning a patient to reduce the pressure outside the chest and allow that person to draw air into the lungs.
“When you hook the shop vac up, you start to draw the pressure down,” said Lipsett.
“When you release that pressure, the pressure around the chest will go back to normal and the patient will be able to exhale.”
Because patients’ breathing ability varies, a valve made from home improvement parts has been implanted in the bucket to adjust the pressure, said the men.
The negative pressure system does have advantages over the now-more-typical positive pressure devices because they don’t obstruct the patients’ face, they continued.
The system was inspired by the Emerson iron lung developed in the mid-20th century to treat polio patients.
While the two academics have kept provincial health authorities abreast of their work, it’s not something they would contemplate using in Alberta, said Ungrin.
There are concerns in Canada, the U.S. and Europe about access to enough ventilators to treat a surge of COVID-19 patients.
On Wednesday, Premier Jason Kenney said Alberta should have enough breathing aids but added “we are working with the federal government to see if we can source additional ventilators.”
The professors’ makeshift device could be used as a template in developing countries hit hard by the novel coronavirus, and as a last resort, he said.
“If we could get a good design working, people could build them with items they have,” said Ungrin, associate professor of comparative biology and experimental medicine in the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine and the university’s Biomedical Engineering research and training programs.
But the two cautioned that shop vacs shouldn’t be used at home by anyone concerned about COVID-19 symptoms.
“The vacuum cleaner could produce enough negative pressure to damage the lungs,” said Ungrin, also emphasizing he hopes the system would never be needed.
“Under any normal circumstances, I would not want to take this to patient care.”
But the men have been working with private-sector players proficient at fabricating valves and other parts that could lead to the manufacture of widely usable devices.
“We’ve been engaging with Alberta industries ... that might have some capacity to adapt older technologies,” said Lipsett.
The work is part of a wider effort to develop easily and quickly crafted devices and procedures that will take the pressure off of health-care staff, said Ungrin and Lipsett.
Meanwhile, the makers of the popular Dyson vacuum cleaners say they’re manufacturing 15,000 medical ventilators to supply the U.K. and other countries facing a shortage of equipment.
The company says it will donate 5,000 of the ventilators that it was able to develop in 10 days, while the ventilators should be ready in early April.