Another Emergency DIY Ventilator Has Been Developed at Rice University to Help Fight COVID-19

COVID-19 is a respiratory illness, and the survival of many people will depend on devices for assisting their breathing. Unfortunately, we’re woefully unprepared to handle the demand — especially in the United States. In 2013, a study found that there are only 62,000 ventilators in all of the hospitals in the US. There are already nearly 200,000 cases of COVID-19 in the US, and this is just the beginning. We clearly need a way to come up with more ventilators quickly. That’s why a team from Rice University has developed a device to automate the use of bag valve masks.

Bag valve masks are far more common and affordable than automated ventilators, but they require that a trained medical professional operate them continuously. We already have a shortage of health care workers, so manually operating a bag valve mask isn’t a long term solution. Devices like this one designed at Rice University are intended to lighten the load by automatically pumping bag valve masks, which would let a single health care worker oversee the breathing assistance for numerous patients. This isn’t the first device we’ve seen that is intended for this purpose — in fact, we’ve featured quite a few of them — but more options are always better.

An entry-level ventilator starts at a price around $5,000, but this device, called ApolloBVM, can be built for just $250. The enclosure can be 3D-printed or assembled from laser cut parts. The device can be controlled by an Arduino or any other development board, which will allow the operating parameters to be adjusted to suit a specific patient’s needs. The bag is pumped using a stepper motor-actuated rack-and-pinion setup that provides plenty of torque. All of the mechanical parts are either off-the-shelf components or 3D-printed. The ApolloBVM team says that they hope to make a DIY packet available soon so the devices can built where they’re needed.