Fifteen months before anyone had heard of the novel coronavirus disease, electronics engineer Cyril Anthony spent weeks in the emergency room of a Hyderabad hospital observing doctors and ventilators at work.
Anthony and fellow engineer Rajesh Thangavel at the Centre for Healthcare Entrepreneurship at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, spent eight weeks in “clinical immersion”, tasked by their supervisor to observe challenges that might be resolved through engineering.
The engineers are now preparing to roll out a homegrown ventilator, at a price lower than those of comparable products, and address a surge — if any — of coronavirus patients in the country that could lead to a shortage of the equipment.
Their startup, Aerobiosys Innovations, incubated by the Centre for Healthcare Entrepreneurship, has developed a low-cost portable emergency-use ventilator that can be operated through a mobile phone App, IIT Hyderabad announced in a media release on Friday. Its design features meet those required for healthcare institutions, the institution said.
“We believe they have developed something unique that could meet the demands of this pandemic situation,” Renu John, a professor of biomedical engineering at IIT Hyderabad, told The Telegraph. “We’re hoping industry partners come forward to handhold this startup to scale up production.”
Anthony and Thangavel, during their clinical immersion in hospitals, noticed a limitation of most standard ventilators — they deliver uniform oxygen and pressure to both lungs, although some patients, particularly those with trauma, might require different levels of pressure and oxygen in the two lungs.
After their clinical immersion phases during November and December 2018, they spent a large part of 2019 designing an alternative ventilator that delivers two airstreams with different parameters into the two lungs.
In early March this year, as the pandemic expanded worldwide and India’s counts grew, the two engineers wondered: why not channel the knowledge they had gained to design a portable low-cost ventilator.
They started designing the device only on March 22, the day the nation observed the “Janata Curfew” urged by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The prototype design has been tested in the laboratory with standard equipment to measure ventilator performance. “In the lab assessment, we find the performance on a par with comparable commercial ventilators,” John said.
A senior emergency medicine doctor at the Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences, Hyderabad, who has mentored the engineers plans to assess the ventilators in clinical settings next week.
While 80 per cent of patients infected by the coronavirus have mild symptoms, studies suggest, between 15 and 20 per cent could develop severe disease and might require hospital care and 5 per cent would require ventilators.
Some healthcare industry executives have estimated that India has between 40,000 to 60,000 ventilators. Whether hospitals are hit by shortages would depend on how fast a surge of patients arrives. Social distancing measures and lockdowns are intended to minimise the surge in patients to ensure all those who can be saved receive appropriate care.
Financial support for the ventilator work came from the Centre for Healthcare Entrepreneurship, which is funded by two US-based IIT alumni — Rajesh Mashruwala and Avi Nash.