Design and Implementation of Portable Emergency Ventilator for COVID-19 Patients

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to overwhelming number of patients in numerous hospitals, clinics, and healthcare facilities resulting in a severe shortage of crucial medical equipment known as the ventilator. The ventilator is extremely necessary for patients that are in dire need of assistance with their breathing caused by the effects of COVID-19. Hospitals only have a fair number of commercial ventilators because they are expensive, large, immobile, and difficult to move. The goal of this paper is to design and build a portable emergency artificial ventilator that is reasonably affordable, small compared to the commercial ventilator, easier to move, could be used at home and can act as a worthy replacement for the commercial ones. The proposed emergency ventilator is based on Arduino microcontroller to control a stepper motor, a pressure sensor, body temperature sensor and a pulse oximeter sensor. It eliminates the need for a human intervention to compress the bag by compressing the self-inflating bag with a lever and it can alarm the facility in case of any abnormal conditions. As a conclusion, it was designed, implemented, and tested with very good results such as pulse oximeter sensor error was 1.02% and temperature sensor error was 0.28%.