That KitchenAid mixer you haven’t used in a while may well help keep a COVID-19 patient breathing and alive.
Irvine-based Aria Group, better known for making components for futuristic air taxis, and a group including two doctors from University of California-Irvine have come up with a plan to turn household mixers into emergency ventilators during the coronavirus pandemic.
Proponents say a mixer such as a KitchenAid Artisan can be reconfigured to squeeze an emergency paramedic’s air bag—known as an Ambu bag—to help the patient breathe while waiting for a high-end ventilator, which currently are in heavy demand and short supply.
Local manufacturers of the high-end products include Lake Forest’s eVent Medical Inc. and Vyaire Medical Inc., which has a large base of operations in Irvine.
Stopgap Effort
While Aria’s focus includes futuristic flying taxis, designing and promoting the much-needed healthcare product of today makes sense, company officials said.
“The concept was to have people donate these mixers from home if they’re not using them toward a better cause,” Aria Chief Executive Clive Hawkins told the Business Journal on April 6.
“Nobody is saying this should replace anywhere near a full, high-end ventilator. This is purely an emergency for the interim cases to buy time for people who are potentially being on the path to being critically ill.”
The idea for the bridge ventilator is straightforward. A plate-like device mounted off center at the front of the mixer rotates, first pushing the breathing bag down and then letting it reflate in a continuous action. The mixer itself allows for varying speeds to regulate the breathing.
Facebook Plea
After seeing a plea on Facebook from a group of medical professionals looking for engineering help, Aria designed the bridge ventilator that can be built affordably, quickly and in sufficient numbers to help address this crisis.
The developers have gone online to call attention to the “common, affordable items and simple tools” with the plans offered for crowd-sourced manufacturing as traditional manufacturing for high-end ventilators has slowed.
A video of the Aria-designed device has received more than 127,000 views on LinkedIn, according to Hawkins.
Made Locally, UCI Ties
Most importantly, the attachment can be manufactured locally in small shops using simple tools for metal fabrication or on a 3D printer.
“There are thousands of those mixers around the world that could be donated locally and combined with locally fabricated parts,” Hawkins said.
The call to action was put out by the Bridge Ventilator Consortium whose founders include Dr. Govind Rajan, an anesthesiologist and intensive care specialist at UCI, and UCI surgeon Dr. Brian Wong.
Meanwhile, Rajan and his UCI colleagues are working to validate the design with mannequin testing and secure necessary approvals from the FDA to deploy the solution in U.S. hospitals.
“This is not very complicated to make,” Rajan told the Business Journal, quoting one of the consortium members.
He added that preparation for a pandemic such as the current coronavirus outbreak was “globally very poor.”
—Kevin Costelloe
