<story><title>Nvidia Releases Low-Cost, Open-Source Ventilator Design</title><url>https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/05/01/low-cost-open-source-ventilator-nvidia-chief-scientist/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rkangel</author><text>There have been a lot of these &amp;#x27;open source ventilators&amp;#x27;, and they kind of miss the point. It&amp;#x27;s easy to make something that performs the basic functionality.&lt;p&gt;I have spent basically every waking hour of the last month and a bit working on a ventilator for my employer (part of Ventilator Challenge UK - project recently suspended). Making something that delivers air in the right duty cycle for breathing is easy. There&amp;#x27;s a few more things you want to do:&lt;p&gt;Blend O2 and Air (&amp;quot;FiO2&amp;quot;). Ventilators need to deliver Oxygen rich air to patients, but not usually 100%. Blenders are harder than you&amp;#x27;d think to make. Note also that having pure O2 in your system means that there&amp;#x27;s a load of stuff you have to get right to prevent fire.&lt;p&gt;Alarms. This is the big one. most of the implementation (even taking account the next feature), was about checks and associated alarms, for blockages, failures etc. Making sure that we beeped loudly if something looked wrong. Note that &amp;#x27;not beeping&amp;#x27; is a much WORSE failure than &amp;#x27;not ventilating&amp;#x27;. If something goes wrong (including complete hardware failure of the ventilator), as long as a healthcare practitioner is aware and responds, then there isn&amp;#x27;t an issue. If the ventilator is happily ventilating away but something is obstructed then the patient might die (there are backup checks like pulse oximetry on the patient, but they&amp;#x27;re slow).&lt;p&gt;Assisted breathing. Driving a solenoid on and off at a particular rate and duty cycle gets you &amp;#x27;mandatory breathing&amp;#x27;. That is great for keeping someone alive. If you&amp;#x27;re not unconscious though, it is both incredibly unpleasant and doesn&amp;#x27;t help you get weaned off and get better. What you want is a device capable of sensing attempted breaths and using the ventilation to &amp;#x27;help&amp;#x27; them. This feature isn&amp;#x27;t 100% necessary - the early plans in the UK were for a massive shortage and for the simplest things we could get in a hurry. It quickly became clear that actually we needed ventilators to help people recover.</text></comment>
<story><title>Nvidia Releases Low-Cost, Open-Source Ventilator Design</title><url>https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/05/01/low-cost-open-source-ventilator-nvidia-chief-scientist/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Nokinside</author><text>&amp;gt; Traditional ventilators, by contrast, can cost more than $20,000&lt;p&gt;Traditional ventilators (ventilator) are very different from 
bag valve masks, resuscitators, PAP and CPAP, BiPAP machines.&lt;p&gt;This Nvidia design is not alternative to that $20,000 hospital ventilator. It&amp;#x27;s emergency-response ventilator  alternative these other cheap designs you can already order from Amazon. You can&amp;#x27;t keep people long time in this kind of device without serious risk of damage to the lungs.</text></comment>