I use an adaptoservo ventilator at night, which really is just a BiPAP with different software. In fact, the machine looks identical to Resmed CPAPs, making me believe it’s just software differences.
Thousands of Americans use these devices.
It is designed to detect a lapse in breathing (in central sleep apnea, your brain forgets to tell you to breathe), and give you a puff to trigger your breathing reflex.
Couldn’t these be modified to function as vents?
In: Engineering
Back in the days of poliomyelitis, respirators were in high demand. The type in use at the time was called a Drinker Respirator or an “Iron Lung”. This was a cabinet that encompassed anything from the chest to the whole body (save the head) and had an associated mechanism to control the pressure inside. By lowering the pressure, the patient was induced to inhale. Interestingly, this is much more in line with how the body naturally breathes and these machines did not and do not cause the kind of injury a positive-pressure machine can.
But of interest to the topic at hand, they can be constructed comparatively easily compared to a positive-pressure device because of this lack of potential for injury; an Australian named Both invented a field-expedient device that enabled his country to meet Polio head-on, and I distinctly recall seeing plans in *Popular Mechanics* or similar for an expedient respirator. People need to look for these sort of plans again if there is worry of insufficient capacity for medical respirators.
These machines declined because they were very large, comparatively, and the patient had to be lying down. So they can become obnoxious for people who need them all the time, but they’re non-invasive and there are still a few people out there who never recovered the ability to breathe unaided and continue to use an “iron lung”.
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