The product was made by the National Key Lab for Digital Control & System Engineering (DCSELAB) – HCMUT – Bach Khoa.

According to DCSELAB, the product was built based on the open-source material belonged to a team of clinicians and mechanical, electronic, computer engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, United States), published in late March 2020.

One of the most serious problems that the patients have to face during the pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 is the shortage of ventilators, as known as the mechanical ventilator. This is an essential medical device to help patients who have respiratory failure thus not being able to maintain the oxygen and carbon dioxide at normal levels and breathe by themselves. This product was originally a paper without being put in practice 10 years ago, conducted by a group of students in the MIT class 2.75 Medical Device Design of MIT as a practical project before the course ended.

Up to now, the MIT research team believes that this student project needs to be put into use.

The MIT device includes:

• 01 Ambu bag (the manual squeezing bag used by doctors/nurses in emergency cases where there is no ventilators)

• 01 endotracheal tube placed in the patient’s trachea

Normally, a SARS-CoV-2 patient will need to be supported by a ventilator for about 2 weeks. If manually squeezing the Ambu bag, the healthcare workers may have to continuously stay nearby the patient. And the bag also needs to be squeezed for million times, each of which has to be done with excellent technique and only professional clinicians can do it. Therefore, the resuscitator of MIT can meet the mechanical requirements by: imitating the squeezing technique. 

The MIT team also warns that this is not a device that everyone who is unskilled can produce at home. It requires profound knowledge about clinical technique and design skills to meet the guidance and parameters according to MIT, based on the strict standard of the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA). Moreover, the resuscitator must be used under clinical observation.

According to MIT, the value of a resuscitator is about 100 USD (Notice: the resuscitator model is different from the ECMO machine – pumping and oxygenating a patient’s blood outside the body, whose price is really high, up to 50.000 USD/machine).

One can say that in the fight against SARS-CoV-2 has greatly motivated the amount of effort and practical invention of the medicine and science technology community around the world, and HCMUT – Bach Khoa are not left behind this positive global trend. Also, DCSELAB successfully developed the mobile sterilization chamber using the spraying technology of 360-degree ultrasonic nozzles, not causing wetness which has primarily applied at the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union headquarter and Traditional Medicine Institute in Ho Chi Minh City.

The DCSELAB research team also said that the “HCMUT-BK-lized” version of the resuscitator is being reviewed and evaluated by experts and can be produced widely if demanded.