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Working as an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, David Van Buren generally spends his time designing and building instruments for space telescopes or robots that will explore other worlds in our Solar System. But for the past month, Van Buren and a group of his colleagues at JPL have been working on a project that is truly unexplored terrain for them: making a ventilator to help sick patients with COVID-19.
Although Van Buren had previous medical engineering experience, he had never designed a ventilator before. But he and his coworkers at JPL are used to doing things they have no experience with. In fact, they are used to doing things that None have experience doing
“We are used to looking for new problems … and figuring out how to solve them.”
“When a scientist comes to us and says they want to go to Jupiter’s moon and drill into the ice and see what’s underneath, that’s something that’s never been done before,” says Van Buren The edge. “We are used to seeing new problems, things that people have not done before or at least that we have not done before, and discover how to solve them.”
After a whirlwind of 37 days of research, planning and tweaking, a subset of engineers at JPL has They created a prototype that they call the VITAL fan. A white digital box with a connected breathing tube, the ventilator is somewhere among the sophisticated high-end ventilators needed by the sickest of patients and a simple ambulatory pouch that can be used as a temporary measure to quickly squeeze air into the lungs . The team did not want to interfere with the production of the most critical ventilators, so the VITAL ventilator is intended for patients who still need respiratory support but who are not in the most extreme conditions. It is a temporary tool designed to last only three to four months in a hospital.
VITAL is specifically designed for people with COVID-19, which helped guide its design. “It comes down to all the things you can do, just retain the necessary functions for COVID-19 patients,” says Van Buren.
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During January and February, Van Buren had been following the news about the spread of COVID-19 in China with growing concern. Pandemics have been on his mind since the H1N1 outbreak in 2009, when his daughter had to be hospitalized due to the new flu strain.
When it became clear in early March that there was a community spread of COVID-19 in Washington and California, Van Buren really began to focus on what he could do to help. Early models suggested that hospitals would not have enough capacity or equipment to handle the influx of patients with COVID-19. Van Buren thought that JPL could be an asset in the fight. One day, they ran into Rob Manning, JPL’s chief engineer, in the downtown cafeteria, and they started talking about what they could do. “We had both been thinking, given the circumstances, perhaps the projects we were spending our time on might not be the most important things we could be doing, given what we both recognized was about to happen,” says Van Buren.
Manning found money to form a small team, and the project started on March 16. The group contacted a pulmonologist named Michael Gurevitch who has been working on ventilators for decades. He walked in and told the team the exact requirements that were needed for the fans, while a JPL employee took detailed notes on a giant whiteboard.
“We more or less apply the pattern that we apply when we build an instrument to land on Mars and, for example, we drill through the surface and take measurements of what’s below,” says Van Buren. “We interact with scientists. In this case, we network with doctors to find out what exactly is needed, so that we can design an instrument, or in this case, a ventilator. “
Eventually, other people at JPL joined the project, including Michelle Easter. Normally, she works on mechanisms known as actuators. These engines are used to deploy or rotate instruments such as solar panels during a mission.
“Actuators are often a combination of mechanisms and electronics,” says Easter. The edge. “And that’s exactly what the VITAL device is; it’s a mechanism controlled by integrated electronic devices, and that kind of design is a very comfortable thing for me.”
To make VITAL, the team tried to use as many common parts as possible, such as tubes, motors, valves, and electronic displays. That way, anyone who manufactures the device in the future would not need to make a special order of everything needed for a more sophisticated fan. The team found that companies and suppliers were eager to help provide supplies that could be scalable. And when they didn’t have what JPL needed, they gave them referrals.
“The companies were just opening up their Rolodexes and giving us the names of their competitors,” says Easter, “which is not what you think for an entrepreneurial mindset. But people threw all the traditional competition out the window.”
Finally, the team settled on the final VITAL design. Because the machine is designed for patients with COVID-19, it focuses on gently delivering air to stiff lungs, a characteristic symptom of the virus. Stiff lungs have a harder time expanding, so patients struggle to get enough air to breathe. VITAL is intended to provide patients with enough air pressure to inflate their lungs, but not so much that the lungs expand excessively. The machine also works to ensure that the lungs do not completely deflate either. COVID-19 patients have lung damage that causes the sides of their lungs to become inflamed and sticky. If all the air comes out of your lungs and the sides touch, they could come together and make it even more difficult to reopen. Therefore, VITAL tries to keep the lungs slightly inflated each time patients breathe out.
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Now that the team has a working prototype, they have gone on to environmental tests with the device. Every time NASA sends a spacecraft to another world, each vehicle must be subjected to extreme conditions, such as wide temperatures, intense vibrations, loud sounds, and more, to see if it can withstand the harsh environment of space. Many of those same tests are also needed to qualify medical equipment, and JPL has the facilities to run them, including a giant vacuum chamber and rigging rigging hardware setups.
“We build spaceships, not medical devices, but there are many similar elements, because both have to be extremely high reliability systems, for different reasons,” says Easter. “For spaceships, once you put it in space, you can never go fix it. Therefore, we must verify that it is absolutely perfect and that it works exactly as we expect in all conditions. Then, of course, for medical devices, we are connecting this to a human; we have to verify that we are not going to hurt a person. Both are very, very important. “
Since the Food and Drug Administration is encouraging organizations to quickly create new devices to fight COVID-19, many of the tests that are generally required to certify equipment are no longer necessary. But JPL has yet to do elevation testing with VITAL to see if the machine will work in places like Denver, for example. They also need to do electromagnetic interference tests, which will determine if VITAL can work normally if someone is, for example, talking on a nearby cell phone.
As the final round of testing is completed, JPL awaits news from the FDA on whether VITAL will receive an emergency use authorization. Once approval is obtained, the team will send the design to companies that can mass produce VITAL and deliver the fans to hospitals that need it. “We don’t do production,” says Van Buren. “We make one or two of a kind, and send them to Mars or Saturn or somewhere. And so we have hired a couple of companies to help us understand the aspects of mass production. ”
It is unclear how the equipment will proceed when the VITAL ventilator is shipped to the world. Many of the people on the team paused their normal projects to get this fan ready as soon as possible. They are likely to redesign interplanetary space probes very soon, but their brief stint in the medical world has encouraged them.
“I think everyone on the team is so grateful that we have something positive to contribute to our brainpower and teamwork,” says Easter. “It definitely helps us feel empowered in an otherwise powerless situation.”
