Homemade Medical Ventilator.

Due to COVID-19 pandemic (Coronavirus) there is a huge lack of Medical Ventilators all around the world. Currently there are not enough Medical ventilators to support the large numbers of projected virus outbreaks in the population that are going to need access to a medical ventilator. Most cities and countries just don't have access to more units and Professional Medical Ventilators have a high price, that's not easy to buy in the hundreds and quickly.

Our goal was to create a project to create a Homemade Medical Ventilator from readily available material off the shelf. This would be very cheap and quick to put together and for a fraction of the price. And whilst you may think its not a viable option to make a home made Ventilator read this article. A Chinese boy was kept alive for 5 years using a home made Ventilator Read here

Legal notice: Firgelli does not accept any responsibility. Make it and use it on your own risk. We are publishing the idea as a backup for desperate times, such as if you are kicked out of the hospital or you know that the hospital has no more Ventilators left for use.

Homemade Medical Ventilator Theory

The principle behind a medical Ventilator is to put oxygen into the lungs and then extract Air from the lungs in a repeatable way that we call breathing. In a situation where someone has Breathing issues such as pneumonia, then the patient is not able to breath on their own and instead they need a machine to do the breathing for them.

The simplest mechanical device we could devise to assist a person’s breathing would be a hand-driven pump that is fitted to the person’s mouth and nose using a mask. The mask would require a one-way valve arrangement to cause air to flow from the device into the lungs when the device is compressed, and out from the lungs to the atmosphere as the device is expanded.

In our Actuator driven Medical Ventilator the Linear Actuator is used to compress the air bag and when it is retracted the expansion of the bag exhales the air from the patients lungs. A Linear Actuator would simply compress a medical Ventilator bag at the correct frequency required by the patient. The Linear Actuator would be connected to an Arduino Board which would allow you to control the speed. Our Linear Actuators can be driven at 100% duty cycle so that the Home made Ventilator can run continuously, as would be required for the patient anyway.

Supplies required to make your own Ventilator:

Bag value mask. Readily available on Amazon these are already made for manual ventilation operation. They also have all the valves required and it have a plug for an oxygen supply if required.
Linear Actuator - we recommend a 6" Stroke Premium Linear Actuator
12V power supply
Arduino controller

To understand how to use an Arduino to control the Actuator which compresses the Medical ventilator bag we created a blog post on how to run an Actuator using an Arduino here we would also be happy to write the software code for you if you decide to make one of these.

#homemademedicalventilator

Step 1: The Linear Actuator Is What Does the Work

This is how a linear Actuator works. we created a very detailed Blog post to show how these Linear Actuators actually work. linear actuator for Medical Ventilator