The Indian Institute of Science Bengaluru Tuesday said that it has successfully completed the prototype of an indigenously developed Intensive Care Unit grade ventilator.
To address the shortage of ventilators due to Covid-19, the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru Tuesday said that it has successfully completed the prototype of an indigenously developed Intensive Care Unit (ICU) grade ventilator.
According to IISc, the ventilator supports both invasive and non-invasive ventilation. The ventilator uses components made in India or easily available in domestic supply chains.
“The ventilator is developed by PRAANA team, the team took about 35 days to go from the drawing board to a proof-of-concept system, and then a working prototype in another two weeks,” IISc said in a Facebook post.
“Built using a custom designed pneumatic system controlled by a microprocessor, it uses proprietary algorithms and techniques to blend air and oxygen in the desired ratio. It also has fine-grained control of patient-side respiratory parameters such as respiration rate, inspiration to expiration ratio, FiO2, and PEEP,” the post read.
According to IISc, the Project PRAANA was started by IISc faculty members Gaurab Banerjee, Duvvuri Subrahmanyam, TV Prabhakar and Pratikash Panda, Bengaluru-based engineer Manas Pradhan and retired IISc professor HS Jamadagni. Many volunteers, including physicians Dr. Supreet Khare, Dr. Sriram Sampath, and Dr. Krishna Prasad, were a part of the project.
“We are now actively exploring options to collaborate with an industry partner to further co-develop the prototype into a field-ready product,” says Duvvuri Subrahmanyam, one of the IISc faculty.
“The project received internal support from IISc, external funding from the office of the Principal Scientific Adviser, Government of India, and a Corporate Social Responsibility contribution from the State Bank of India Foundation. Narayana Health, Bengaluru, provided medical testing equipment for verification of the ventilator performance” the IISC said in the post.
“We have designed this ventilator based on the feedback from some of the top doctors of the country, who are also part of our medical team,” said Pratikash Panda, Project PRAANA founding team member.
According to the Karnataka health department, there are 720 ventilators allocated across hospitals for Covid-19 patients in the state.