NeT-Vent: Low-Cost, Rapidly Scalable and IoT-enabled Smart Invasive Mechanical Ventilator with adaptive control to reduce incidences of Pulmonary Barotrauma in SARS-CoV-2 patients

Abstract

The recent outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has disrupted healthcare systems all over the world. With the spread of multiple variants, the progress of the pandemic is unpredictable. In critical cases, viral respiratory illness causes fluid build-up in the lungs, requiring the patient to be on ventilation to have sufficient oxygen. With an enormous shortage of ventilators worldwide, the creation of an emergency ventilator has become a compelling international engineering challenge. This paper demonstrates a distinct proof-of-concept design and working of NeT-Vent: a low cost, rapidly scalable, easy to manufacture and IoT-enabled smart invasive mechanical ventilator which addresses Pulmonary Barotrauma, a Ventilator Induced Lung Injury, whose incidences are being increasingly reported during ventilation of COVID-19 patients and remains unaddressed in most open-source ventilators. Prevention of Pulmonary Barotrauma can attenuate multi-organ failure, thus improving survival in high-risk patients. The proposed control system addresses this problem through adaptive control with real-time pressure correction. Further, using Internet-of-Things for remote monitoring of real-time patient vitals through app/ web-based cloud interface drastically reduces the chances of exposure of medical staff to COVID-19 also reducing the requirement of PPE-Kits. The proposed ventilator is extensively evaluated on various parameters and compared with other open-source ventilators. Project NeT-Vent won the Best Project Award at the University of Queensland Engineering Design hackathon, India 2020 on Ventilator Design.