DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF A SELF-MODULATING LOW-COST NEONATAL VENTILATOR

Abstract

The second decade of the 21st Century ended with what historians claim as the deadliest pandemic of the last 100 years. The world of 2020 witnessed the collapse of human society in every way possible. Be it health, hygiene, economy, travel, employment or infrastructure; we, as an extensive society degraded in almost every sphere of life. It has been more than two years since the first COVID-19 case was reported but the aftereffects of the Coronavirus are imminent to this date, not only in forms of variants such as Omicron but also a general sense of fear towards illness and medical ailment. Despite the combined efforts of Governments and International Organizations, the percentage of positive cases is increasing day after day. The situation with the death-toll is no different, particularly in under-developed (and developing) countries. In times such as these where respiratory diseases are of pivotal importance to everybody, we decided to dedicate our Final Year Project towards manufacturing a Biomedical device that counters respiratory syndromes in new-born babies. “Devices” countering the said syndromes are currently available in the market but not without a hefty price tag of at-least 2 million Pakistani Rupees. In times of the pandemic where health and economy have crashed alike, it is almost impossible for an average earning Pakistani man or woman to access expensive healthcare for his/her child. In cases where these “devices” are somehow available to general public, they require lots of manual adjustments and are subjected to a significant amount of human error, which can prove fatal in the case of new-born babies. These are precisely the problems that we are looking forward to resolve through our proposed project. Our ventilator will not only be self-modulating but will also be budgeted at PKR 20,000 only. We call it a “Self-modulating Low-cost Neonatal Ventilator”.