Medical ventilators have become one of the most important life-saving equipment for the critical COVID19 patients. But these ventilators are still scarce in rural and several urban hospitals. That is why this rare device has been made available to everyone by the Bangladeshi technology startup CRUX. The 3D printed ventilator presented by CRUX can be made at a very low cost in an emergency. Moreover, keeping the commercial thought aside, the inventors of the ventilator has kept the source code of the ventilator open for all.
Meanwhile, the International Conference on Biomedical and Biometrics of Japan has adopted the ventilator after verifying its efficiency. On August 10, the ventilator was registered with the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) as the first medical device in the history of the country. The certificate number is BD000001.
According to the inventors of the ventilator, the noise level of this Bangladeshi ventilator is about half the noise of a normal ventilator available in the market. Instead of solenoids, a completely self-invented pressure release mechanism and pip valve have been used that can be made consuming 35 times less power and at a lower cost. The parts of the drone have been used in it. Any of its parts can be easily replaced. The startup time of the ventilator is less than that of a commercial ventilator and is much easier to use. It is capable of running in PRVC, PCB, SIMV, BiPAP mode. Moreover it can work in almost all types of patient circuits in the market. Its large display displays important real time data.
In April last year, a month after the Corona pandemic hit Bangladesh, Syed Rajwanul Haque Nabil, founder and CEO of CRUX, the country’s first drone inventor, began work on the ventilator. He was accompanied by team member AKM Maruf Hossain Rahat. Later they were joined by Shovon Sudan Saha, Mohammad Hasanur Rahman Sohag, Fazle Rabbi Shafi and Satya Ranjan Sarkar. The first prototype of the ventilator was made in July 2020.
Inventor team leader Nabil said that this open source ventilator can be produced commercially at a cost of only Tk 1-2 lakh with miscellaneous cost.
