The Project
This is a community resiliency project. There is a critical shortage of ventilators. Can the community using local talent and available resources create a solution in response to the need? This project funds this resilience project which will result in the production of ventilators. This project will fund the design, manufacturing, testing, distribution, and open source sharing of the design. It is not funding the use of the ventilators, if they are ever used. The use of the ventilators are at the sole description of attending physicians and all ventilators will be appropriately labeled that they are not FDA approved or licensed any way for use in a clinical setting.
Within a four week period, design and manufacture 400 emergency ventilators that can be used as a last resort measure by trained physicians across Hawaii hospitals during the COVID-19 crisis. The design will meet minimum requirements to be clinically useful and be able to be produced locally using available resources. The final design will be open sourced under a creative commons license and published as detailed build plans with video instructions onto Github. The core design has been developed by Dr. Matthes with engineering support from the team. Manufacturing of mechanical parts will be done on Oahu with final assembly on Maui and Oahu. A total of 400 emergency ventilators are planned for production and will be distributed to hospitals on Oahu, Maui, Molokai, Lanai, and Hawaii Island. Capacity to produce additional ventilators will be also enabled by this project and additional funding will be raised to cover ventilators beyond the 400 requested. The target amount of total production is 1,000 units.
Developing and producing an emergency ventilator in this timeline borders on what’s possible. While the team is confident early work on designs and past experience will ensure reasonable success in reaching the 400 unit milestone, there are numerous logistical factors that are outside of the team’s control which may delay and/or reduce the total number of delivered ventilators. On the other hand, additional volunteers and resources from the community could also drive the number of delivered ventilators beyond 150.
Unique Aspects of the Project
- The design of Kahanu is built upon the prior innovation of a worldwide community of engineers, medical professionals, makers and hackers — most notably the OxyGEN team in Barcelona.
- The design is based on mechanical respiration and requires no software or microcontrollers.
- This is a complete and comprehensive ventilator and includes all of the plumbing to connect to a hospital system.
- 100% of the system that comes in contact with patient air is sourced with medical grade equipment.
- A manual hand crank can be manually operated if the motor or power system fails.
- The motor and Ambu (BVM) bag are mounted in positions that make field swaps extremely easy with just a wrench and 15 minutes.
- The system includes a pressure gauge and a breath-per-minute monitor.
- The system uses simple mechanics and motor controllers to control the breaths per minute.
- The system is extremely sturdy; no sensitive electronics to damage.
- Tidal volume can be changed with simple switching of the cam.
Download Our Design Files
Like the projects that inspired and guided us, the Kahanu design is open source. Notes, Kahanu is open hardware project. It should only be built for emergency situations, and should always be operated by qualified personnel and under medical supervision during medical emergencies where there are no other options available.