Galway Bay fm newsroom - Staff within GMIT's School of Engineering have designed an emergency ventilator to assist healthcare staff in the treatment of COVID-19 patients.
The emergency ventilator automates the squeezing of a manual Bag-Valve-Mask resuscitator, so that it can act as a rudimentary ventilator to aid a person breathing, or to replicate some basic ventilation functions.
The system is designed out of bio-grade, readily available and laser cut material, so that it can be built anywhere.
The GMIT team hopes to make the calibrated device open source, pending regulatory and governmental approval.
However it says regardless of acquiring the certification, several units will be manufactured for demonstration and calibration purposes, and for undergraduate engineering learning and teaching.
James Boyle, Head of the Advanced Craft Certificate Programme for Electrical Installation, GMIT, says the breathing cycle and air volume delivery is fully controllable using simple rotary dial controls.
It comes as world health experts have stated there are likely to be several waves of outbreaks and that a large increase in conventional ventilator production is still likely to fall short of the global demand.
Worldwide governments have issued an appeal to boost ventilator production and are ordering ventilators as part of the efforts to combat the disease.
