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The CPAP-Approach
Please check the detailed description of the CPAP unit: CPAP description.
CPAP (Continous positive airway pressure)-ventilation is a common form of medical therapy when people suffer from sleep related respiratory problems like sleep apnoa. Worn at night, these masks keep the patients' respiratory tracts open by inducing a continous overpressure. CPAP units are available in large numbers in common households as well as in hospitals.
Figure: All six different versions of the CPAP extension unit "CARL"
We have developed a method to extend a CPAP unit to a convenient non-invasive ventilation system to support a patient's breathing. This will help preventing problems due to a shortage of high-end ventilation systems.
To allow for a successful ventilation of a patient, different levels of pressure have to be applied during inhalation and exhalation. Our unit will be inserted between the CPAP unit and the air tube and allows tuning the provided continuous CPAP-pressure such that alternating levels of pressure are achieved.
Our solution consists of two components:
- a) a small hatch
- b) a microcontroller unit
The hatch is used to tune the pressure at the pressure mask by applying opening and closing sequences. A servodrive is controlled by a microcontroller to control this process. Our team has written the respective code to allow for a periodic opening-closing sequence and thereby supporting the breathing process as good as possible. Additional parts within our design will ensure that the pressure stays within a certain regime. Moreover, connections are planned which allow for a potential attachement to a direct oxygen supply.
Most of the components for our solution can be printed with a 3D-printer. Additional components, like the microcontroller and the servomotor, can be bought in electronics stores.
We have recently built our first working prototype to verify our concept and to test basic operations.. The prototype is shown in operation in the following video: https://youtube.com/video/RCZkSUAaGAo
A further test of our prototype can be seen here (as of March 21st): https://youtu.be/A6qe4ckgw8U
This video shows a test of our second, further improved prototype (evening of March 21st): https://youtu.be/xVVP6O_0aLg
Our newest prototype can be seen here (as of March 24th): https://youtu.be/OQiMXHRqIqg
We have already presented our prototype to physicians who gave us a positive evaluation of our design.