Low-cost ventilator developed by robotic engineer a boon for patients

The world’s cheapest and smallest ventilator, which looks like a clunky cell phone and can easily slip into your back pocket, has been developed by a young robotics engineer in Delhi in collaboration with a neurosurgeon at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences.

“It is almost 450 times smaller than the conventional ventilators and can be moved around easily,” said the 25-year-old inventor Diwakar Vaish.

He developed it with Dr Deepak Agrawal, professor of neuroscience at AIIMs, who have seen scores of such patients living in hospital because the family cannot afford to buy a portable ventilator, which costs about Rs 2 lakh.

When the pocket ventilator hits the market after clinical trials and approval from the drug controller general of India, it will cost between Rs 15,000 and Rs 20,000, which is less than the Rs 5-15 lakh that a traditional ventilator would cost.

Controlled with an android app, the ventilator uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to adjust air supply to the normal breathing pattern of the patient.

“It works by pushing the atmospheric air into the lungs of the patients who cannot breathe on their own. The disposable ventilators currently in use also push in air, but they do it at a fixed frequency that does not necessarily match the patient’s breathing pattern, which may cause low oxygen saturation. This device synchronises ventilator air support with the normal breathing pattern,” said Dr Agrawal.