Corey RM, Widloski EM, Null D, Ricconi B, Johnson MA, White KC, Amos JR, Pagano A, Oelze ML, Switzky RD, Wheeler MB, Bethke EB, Shipley CF, Singer AC. Low-Complexity System and Algorithm for an Emergency Ventilator Sensor and Alarm.
IEEE Trans Biomed Circuits Syst 2020;
14:1088-1096. [PMID:
32870799 PMCID:
PMC8545031 DOI:
10.1109/tbcas.2020.3020702]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/19/2020] [Accepted: 08/08/2020] [Indexed: 06/11/2023]
Abstract
In response to anticipated shortages of ventilators caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations have designed low-cost emergency ventilators. Many of these devices are pressure-cycled pneumatic ventilators, which are easy to produce but often do not include the sensing or alarm features found on commercial ventilators. This work reports a low-cost, easy-to-produce electronic sensor and alarm system for pressure-cycled ventilators that estimates clinically useful metrics such as pressure and respiratory rate and sounds an alarm when the ventilator malfunctions. A low-complexity signal processing algorithm uses a pair of nonlinear recursive envelope trackers to monitor the signal from an electronic pressure sensor connected to the patient airway. The algorithm, inspired by those used in hearing aids, requires little memory and performs only a few calculations on each sample so that it can run on nearly any microcontroller.
Collapse