Designing Emergency Pneumatic Ventilators for Covid-19
At the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Carle Foundation Hospital – the only Level I Trauma Center in Central Illinois – anticipated a potentially imminent shortage of ventilators. To address this critical shortage, Carle partnered with the University of Illinois Grainger College of Engineering to develop an emergency pneumatic ventilator for rapid, low-cost production. As part of this team, I served as liaison between clinical and engineering teams, translating complex medical requirements into actionable technical specifications. My role involved synthesizing input from diverse stakeholders including physicians, respiratory therapists, and engineers to ensure the final product would meet real-world medical demands under emergency conditions. Our design, RapidVent, was eventually approved by the FDA under an emergency use authorization (EUA) and licensed to Belkin for mass production.
Role
Design Researcher
Topic Areas
Healthcare, Rapid Manufacturing
Project Type
Research, Product Design
Our Process
I began by compiling a comparative analysis of current pneumatic ventilator designs while following parallel efforts happening across the world. My initial research identified the Vortran Go2Vent as a design with immense potential. We set out to reverse-engineer its design into a functional prototype to specifically meet the anticipated needs of COVID-19 patients.
The RapidVent team spent three weeks re-engineering this base design. Daily 7 a.m. meetings followed by 13+ hours of sub-team meetings, interviews, prototyping, testing, and iteration became the familiar tempo of our days as the severity and scale of the Covid-19 crisis began to settle on us. The manufacturing process was extremely iterative with research happening concurrently with prototype development. As part of the user experience sub-team, we interviewed physicians, respiratory therapists, nurses, hospital administrators, and several other clinicians. I straddled the Engineering & Test, User Experience, and Sensor & Alarms sub-teams, leveraging education in materials engineering and experience in design research to integrate clinical insights into the technical parameters of the design.
The first working prototype of the RapidVent in action.
Demonstration of the additional RapidAlarm system.
Outputs
After three intense weeks of research, prototyping, and iteration we designed a functional 3D-printed, pneumatic ventilator designed for emergency treatment of Covid-19 patients. In partnership with Belkin, this design was submitted and approved by the FDA for use under the emergency use authorization (EAU). The final designs are available online under a free license. To read more about RapidVent see this webpage. The results and process were also published in the academic journal PLOS One which is accessible here.