COVID-19: Indian-American Couple Develops Low-Cost Emergency Ventilator

Devesh Ranjan and his wife Kumuda Ranjan have developed a low-cost portable emergency ventilator which will help in the battle against the Covid-19 pandemic.

An Indian-American couple took just three weeks to develop the emergency ventilator, which will soon be in production stage and will be available in India and the developing world.

Devesh is a professor in Georgia Tech’s George W Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and Kumuda a practising family physician in Atlanta,

“If you can do a manufacturing of scale, it can be produced (item cost) for less than $100. Even with a price point of $500, they (the manufacturer) would have enough money to make sure that they are making enough profit in the market,” Professor Ranjan was quoted as saying by PTI.

A ventilator of this type costs $10,000 on an average in the US, he added. He also clarified that this is not an ICU ventilator, which costs more.

The Open-AirVentGT has been developed to address acute respiratory distress syndrome, a common complication for Covid-19 patients. It uses electronic sensors and computer control to manage key clinical parameters such as respiration rate, tidal volume (the amount of air moved into and out of the lungs during each cycle), inspiration and expiration ratio, and pressure on the lungs, Prof. Ranjan explained.

“The goal of this project was to make a low cost makeshift ventilator that gives those controls to the physician,” Dr Kumuda said. He is of the opinion that there is going to be a global shortage of ventilators, given the growing spread of coronavirus which so far has killed more than 345,000 people globally.