From Spacecrafts to Saving Lives Aryaman Sharma reports on NASA’s latest innovation; VITAL.
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n December 31st, 2019, the first case of COVID-19 was reported in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China. Since then, this dreadful outbreak has not only caused a large number of deaths globally but has also created enormous dearth in medical equipment like masks, gloves, PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) kits and ventilators. However, as it is rightly said, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. Numerous multi-national companies have innovated in order to produce more essential medical equipment such as ventilators, despite the subsequent difficulties due to their profound level of specialization and the complexity of the process of building ventilators. Tesla, for example, has retrofitted some car parts from Model 3, while Ford and General Motors have restructured entire assembly lines to manufacture ventilators. Meanwhile, other firms such as Dyson have shifted production from vacuum cleaners to ventilators. Justifying the necessity of such innovation, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California designed a working prototype for a high-pressure ventilator in merely 37 days . They submitted the prototype to a renowned medical facility in New York City. Matthew Levin, M.D., director of innovation at the Human Simulation Lab, said, “The NASA prototype performed as expected under a wide variety of simulated patient conditions.”, also giving the prototype the green light on April 31st. Subsequently, the prototype was then given the name, VITAL- (“Ventilator Intervention Technology Accessible Locally”). The VITAL ventilator is a white digital box containing an endotracheal tube (breathing tube) and a comprehensive set of filters and sensors. VITAL lies somewhere between the sophisticated high-end ventilators that critical patients need, and a simple ambulatory bag (also known as a bag valve mask) used to provide patients with pressure ventilation. This ventilator has also been specifically designed for patients with milder symptoms. Hence, it can be built much faster than a traditional ventilator and is comprised of fewer and more plentiful parts like tubing, motors, valves and electronics displays, making it more economical to produce than existing ventilators.
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