AgVa Healthcare Invents The World’s Cheapest & Compact Ventilator to Fight COVID-19

A ventilator is lifesaving medical equipment for critically ill patients who have difficulty in breathing, many times used as a last effort for patient survival.

It’s also called a breathing machine or respirator requires making sure the person is getting enough oxygen and is getting rid of carbon dioxide, attached to a computer that is controlled by a respiratory therapist, or doctor.

Due to the huge chunk of money involved and limited scale of the traditional ventilator; many patients, unfortunately, don’t get enough treatment and die prematurely in most developing countries.

India faces a huge shortage of ventilator beds needed to support critically-ill patients who cannot breathe on their own. In the present scenario of the Coronavirus outbreak, this will definitely help patients to save their life.

Pocket Size Ventilator Controlled by a Smartphone (Images credit: Prof. Diwakar Vaish / Dr. Deepak)

To address this issue, a 25-year old robotics engineer Prof Diwakar Vaish and a neurosurgeon Dr. Deepak Agrawal at the AIIMS have invented the world’s smallest and affordable ventilator which can easily fit in your pocket!

If you have an android phone, you can control or run a new ventilator yourself easily without much involvement of a medical professionals.

It’s almost 450 times smaller than the conventional ventilators uses an Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithm to control the air supply to restore the normal breathing pattern of the patient.

The pocket ventilator is a great achievement in the field of medical science as it can save millions of people’s lives who are not able to breathe normally or whose lungs function insufficiently.

How does this tiny pocket sized ventilator work?

A new ventilator pushes the atmospheric air into the lungs of the patients who have difficulty breathing.

Unlike, traditional ventilator which pushes air at a fixed frequency that doesn’t necessarily match the patient’s breathing pattern and may result in low oxygen saturation, while invented ventilator synchronizes the air to achieve the normal breathing pattern.

The earlier version of the pocket-sized ventilator can work on the normal power connection and comes with an additional battery backup for a couple of hours.

As a safety feature, in an event of technical malfunction, this device will run on alternate or secondary mode and a message will be delivered to your android phone which will assist you in how to correct the device.

A robotics scientist Prof Diwakar is a serial inventor and his earlier technological inventions helped many people to gain normal life.

In the past, his invention ‘Manav’, a brain-controlled wheelchair & brain cloning to provide respite to the people suffering from paralysis. The mechanism of the wheelchair is designed in a way that it solely operates through the thought process of the person sitting on it.

Now AgVa Healthcare’s co-founder Diwakar Vaish has teamed up with automobile manufacturer Maruti Suzuki to ramp up production of ventilators after the government called on all firms to contribute to the anti-coronavirus effort.

AgVa has a capacity to produce 500 units per month but has been manufacturing 100 to 200 ventilators so far. As the death toll due to fresh coronavirus mounts across the country, which is under lockdown, AgVa is increasing production at both its units in Noida bordering the outskirts of the national capital.

An AgVa ventilator weighs only 3.5 kg and helps move less-critical patients back to their homes as the machine is easy to transport and install, and does not need much power. Ventilators pump air into the lungs and are critical for hospitals around the world as they are swamped with COVID-19 cases.