Low-Complexity System and Algorithm for an Emergency Ventilator Sensor and Alarm
Abstract
In response to the shortage of ventilators caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations have designed low-cost emergency ventilators. Many of these devices are pressure-cycled pneumatic ventilators, which are easy to produce but often do not include the sensing or alarm features found on commercial ventilators. This work reports a low-cost, easy-to-produce electronic sensor and alarm system for pressure-cycled ventilators that estimates clinically useful metrics such as pressure and respiratory rate and sounds an alarm when the ventilator malfunctions. A low-complexity signal processing algorithm uses a pair of nonlinear recursive envelope trackers to monitor the signal from an electronic pressure sensor connected to the patient airway. The algorithm, inspired by those used in hearing aids, requires little memory and performs only a few calculations on each sample so that it can run on nearly any microcontroller.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2006.03664,
title = {Low-Complexity System and Algorithm for an Emergency Ventilator Sensor and Alarm},
author = {Ryan M. Corey and Evan M. Widloski and David Null and Brian Ricconi and Mark Johnson and Karen White and Jennifer R. Amos and Alex Pagano and Michael Oelze and Rachel Switzky and Matthew B. Wheeler and Eliot Bethke and Clifford Shipley and Andrew C. Singer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.03664},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
Open-source hardware and software: https://rapidalarm.github.io/