Indian American Couple Develops Ventilator for COVID-19
Devesh Ranjan and his wife, Kumuda Ranjan combined their skills to develop an emergency ventilator for Covid-19 patients in the space of just three weeks. Devesh Ranjan is a professor and associate chair at the Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. His wife, Dr Kumuda Ranjan is a practicing family physician in Atlanta. Professor Ranjan was brought up in Patna and obtained a degree from REC, Trichy with a Masters and PhD from University of Wisconsin. Dr Kumuda has been in the US since she was six years old and underwent medical training in New Jersey.
The low cost portable ventilator is at the production stage and should be made available in India and other developing countries to give critical care treatment to Covid-19 patients. It took just three weeks for the couple to come up with a concept and translate it to a prototype. According to the Professor if the product is mass manufactured its cost could be less than $ 100 to make and even if it is sold for $ 500 there would be adequate profits. The average price for a medical ventilator is about $ 10000. This ventilator prototype, however, is not the ICU type, he clarified.
He terms it the Open AirVentVT and it is not quite as sophisticated as the ICU type. It uses sensors and computerized control to keep track of and control volume of air moving in and out of lungs, rate of respiration, inspiration and expiration ratio and lung pressure. The ventilator was developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Dr Kumuda is of the opinion that there will be a global shortage of ventilators as cases surge and this ventilator should help provide relief and help clinicians deliver care to critical Covid-19 patients. In the US alone about 98000 deaths have taken place so far.
