One of the first mornings of quarantine, early March 2020 in San Diego, California; a team of 10 engineers started working remotely with one shared drive: to help battle the current CoVid-19 pandemic. With that purpose in mind, we designed our unique ventilator.

Our prototype of an affordable, easy-to-replicate ventilator is here to break standards, to challenge the way we think about healthcare, making ventilation affordable for everyone, everywhere, so that we are better prepared to protect people that need them the most. The FIVENT unit is a portable device capable of providing both pressure and volume-controlled mechanical ventilation as a cost-effective, easy to build, functional solution. The device is made up of a control module with an LCD display, a bellow-piston air pump, and a patient airway circuit with two solenoid valves, a PEEP and an HME valve, two pressure sensors, and a single-use ventilator mask. Furthermore, the mask can be detached to connect to standard hospital ventilator masks, and oxygen saturation can be implemented, given that we made our device compatible with oxygen tanks. FIVENT runs on 12V DC current, has a battery back-up power source to power the ventilator, and is driven by an Arduino codebase controlled by a proprietary program. FIVENT, unlike other solutions, such as the M.U.R, has the ability to do both pressure and volume control, as by using the bellow-piston mechanism, we know the volume being fed to the patient.

Above all, in FIVENT, we believe that as technology grows enabling us to reach what before seemed unattainable, we must grow with it. Along those lines, our vision after the first year of implementation is for our product to be readily available and to have established a workflow for the assembly of pre-prepared kits, and its efficient delivery wherever needed. Furthermore, motivated by our desire to make this technology accessible and have a positive impact in bridging the inequality gap currently abysmal in healthcare, we would like to collaborate with nonprofit health organisms working in the field to provide ventilation devices in means of a partnership.

FiVent website