The aim of the EVMD project is to develop a portable / wearable, miniaturized multi-sensor respiratory protection system with low power consumption as intelligent personal protective equipment (PPE), which is particularly suitable for providing protection and monitoring functions to doctors in the healthcare sector and the public. Currently only with disposable and separate devices possible. The Emergency Ventilator Medical Device (EVMD) is a respiratory protection system that is able to sterilize the breathing air flow in real time without the use of a specific substance formulation. It contains miniaturized intelligent UV solutions, man-made materials and an advanced control unit that enables contemporary environmental monitoring as a sentinel for viral emergencies and spread in communities.
EVMD will drive the further miniaturization and power reduction of the UV sterilization unit, which is to be embedded in several qualified and certified intelligent PPE. This is an important task and project achievement in itself. BEIA owns a prototype at TRL6 that requires additional engineering to move to a higher TRL prior to validation, certification and marketing.
• Integration of a multi-sensor front-end module for the detection of respiratory diseases and health data;
• Integration of a special passive patch for environmental monitoring as an offline sentinel for the emergence and spread of viruses in communities. The patch is made of a material that can collect bioaerosol inhaled by the wearer for offline analysis. The patch could be further replaced by optical biosensors;
• Complete system integration, with hardware integration, UV sterilization of breaths, optimization and management of system power consumption at runtime, signal and data processing, sensor data fusion, wireless communication, reliability, user interface and connection to the cloud for analysis and AI services are all optimized and based on application-specific requirements.
• Immediate participation of 2 end-users in communities of fragile and weak elderly people, including the reward of anonymized data exchange using blockchain tokens.
In the context of emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic, providing smarter, safer, and reusable PPE is a huge benefit to society. EVMD will mainly rely on an intelligent mobile ventilator that will bring together information from sensors, calculate the optimization model for the UV sterilization strategy and provide appropriate health feedback. The merger of several complementary sensor technologies and wearables offers better detection of a greater variety of features and better coverage of the optimization strategy. As explained above, this combination of sensors provides more reliable detection. This EVMD system must be light so that it can be carried by the “user” (person, wheelchair, robot, drone, etc.). However, a light weight is not enough to be accepted by the user. It must offer a no-charge life that is compatible with user activity. It also has to be small so that it can eventually be placed on the “user”. Last but not least, the system must be connected to its intelligent environment in order to collect information from its environment, send its own results and offer the “user” new functions. Cost is also of great importance for distribution across a variety of application areas as well as for getting to market quickly. For this reason, it was assumed that the device would also be manufactured using 3D printing in order to increase the resilience of the UE manufacturing system in the event of a manufacturing overload or a lack of furniture. Monitoring respiratory rate (RR) and checking for abnormalities in a timely manner is one way of providing early detection and monitoring. Any increase in excess of 30 breaths / min over an extended period of time can be viewed as a condition of warming that requires pulsed arterial oxygen saturation (SaO2) for immediate treatment. Patients with mild symptoms and no underlying chronic conditions – heart disease, kidney failure, immunocompromised conditions that put the patient at increased risk of complications – can be cared for at home or when hospitalization may not be possible due to the stress the health system.
The EVMD system is used for real-time sterilization and offline monitoring of any infections caused by exposure to infected people. The system can be used indoors and outdoors and has particular effects on sensitive people. The applications include the integration in robotic and autonomous systems, the protection of people with impaired people in poor health conditions, the data fusion with instruments in smart hospitals, smart homes and smart factories.