2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how access to medical device R&D resources, including ventilators, is essential for new biomedical engineering teams to succeed in getting their ideas noticed, securing funding, and ultimately providing their products to patients. Equally, early coursework exposure of future developers and clinical users of such technology is an important criterion for the generation of future ideas and progress of intensive care medicine. The pandemic has created student recognition of the global need for critical respiratory care, motivating hands-on educational kits based around sophisticated medical devices, which are scarce and not easily affordable for most universities. To help meet this need, we developed an open-source medical ventilator education platform, intentionally transparent in nature. The mechanical design specifically aimed to be simultaneously visible to a group of about eight students in a group classroom teaching scenario. A working prototype of the platform was constructed and tested, achieving Pressure-Controlled-Ventilation (PCV) mode medical functionality typically provided by expensive ICU ventilators. Via a plastic test lung, the platform is capable of teaching principles of pulmonology and basic respiratory therapy. It can also be used for advanced mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, bioengineering, and computer programming projects. To effectively democratize this technology, a high degree of modularity supports unique changes or extensions in the hardware and software design by local manufacturers, research labs, or upper-class bioengineering capstone projects. The technology licenses allow any engineering or research group to build and/or modify one without a fee or legal encumbrance. Design principles that make it good for hands-on training also make it easy to build, modify, and service, making it ideal for graduate research labs or low-and-middle income countries. We implemented a pilot study of educational utility in a bioengineering troubleshooting class at Rice University with a cohort of 12 students. Eight troubleshooting classroom exercises were developed: failures were intentionally implanted into the device and students were asked to troubleshoot contributing causes based on dynamically changing visual breath waveforms. Guidance was provided as needed to students utilizing tactile and audio/visual senses to identify failure points. Student feedback revealed that 100% agreed it improved their understanding of ventilators and troubleshooting ventilators, 83% would recommend this to other universities, and 58% wanted a longer module, revealing that the platform has strong potential to bring value into the classroom.