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The ventilator they are producing employs a motor that compresses a bellow system in a controlled fashion.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are designing it to stay completely off the medical supply line from the ground up,\u201d says Pacik-Nelson. \u201cA lot of the components we are using are food-grade and already authorized for biocompatibility with humans. Our ventilator measures for specific amounts of pressures and volumes so that what is prescribed by a doctor is reaching the patient.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNoah\u2019s leadership effort shines as much in The Ventilator Project as it does in my class with his invention and development of an automated emergency response product,\u201d says UConn engineering professor Hadi Bozorgmanesh.<\/p>\n
Justin Schroder \u201920 (ENG) is doing hands-on work in the prototyping and development of the ventilator. The Fairfield native brings a wide variety of knowledge to the process, which is on its sixth iteration of a prototype.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are working directly with computer modeling as we compare ours to ventilators on the market. We want to improve on those, but also decide what those have that we don\u2019t need,\u201d says Schroder.<\/p>\n
Mark Waldner \u201919 (CLAS) is currently in law school at the University of New Hampshire and is part of the effort to get the ventilator approved for manufacturing.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy job is to be the liaison between the lawyerly talk and engineering talk and bridge the gap the best I can,\u201d says the Portland native.<\/p>\n
Waldner said The Ventilator Project is currently looking to secure emergency-use authorization through the Food and Drug Administration.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are trying to get our product authorized to be used during this pandemic and move on from there,\u201d says Waldner. \u201cHopefully, we will continue to grow and branch out to help out with other medical devices.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once the COVID-19 pandemic is over, Pacik-Nelson believes their efforts and philosophies can be used to provide much-needed medical equipment around the world.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe people who have come together as a result of this project would have never have done so without a time of COVID-19,\u201d says Pacik-Nelson. \u00a0\u201cI hope that it will make people more cognizant of all the shortcomings the world is currently facing. We have realized that $60,000 ventilators are the only things on the market and that\u2019s not affordable for much of the world. These types of issues affect people around the world on a much more regular basis than we realize.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pacik-Nelson believes his experience at UConn has prepared him greatly for his work on the The Ventilator Project.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have developed a diverse skill set that allowed me to be involved in this project in the first place,\u201d says Pacik-Nelson. \u201cI handled a lot of things at once because I was one of the first engineers here. UConn prepared me to balance a lot of different projects under a lot of different umbrellas that are going on at the same time. That skill set prepares someone well for a project like this, or at another start-up.\u201d<\/p>\n