Abstract — Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) threatens to overwhelm our medical infrastructure at the regional level, causing spikes in mortality rates because of shortages of critical equipment, like ventilators. Various variants of coronavirus are still being found in various parts of the world, like South Africa, Switzerland, and China, and also there is a threat of the 4th wave of Covid-19 to hit India in August. Fortunately, with the recent development and widespread deployment of small-scale manufacturing technologies like open-source microcontrollers, mass distributed manufacturing of ventilators has the potential to overcome medical supply shortages. In this study, after providing background on ventilators, we review the academic literature to find the existing and already openly published, vetted designs for ventilators systems.A mechanical ventilator is a medical device that is usually used to ventilate patients who cannot breathe adequately on their own. Among many types of ventilators, Bag Valve Mask (BVM)/ Ambu Bag is a manual ventilator in which a bag is pressed to deliver air into the lungs of the patient. In the present work, a mechanical system along with microcontroller has been developed to automate the operation of BVM. Although the developed device cannot compress the bag completely due to low powered servo motors, it proves the concept of automating the operation of BVM using the mechanical system for developing a portable ventilator.
Index Terms— Coronavirus, COVID-19, ventilators, BVM, Ambu Bag .
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