ABSTRACT
[...]these measures should be combined with other measures. [...]the paper Maintenance of Passive House Standard in the Light of Long-Term Study on Energy Use in a Prefabricated Lightweight Passive House in Central Europe [5] is an experimental study on different parameters: the orientation that maximizes heat gains from solar radiation, thermal insulation of partitions, heat provided by a geothermal heat pump, and a mechanical ventilation system with a heat exchanger. Since the science has spoken, politicians and citizens now need to do their part to achieve the shared goal of a more sustainable and energy efficient building sector.
ABSTRACT
Although the cure for the SARS-CoV-2 virus (COVID-19) will come in the form of pharmaceutical solutions and/or a vaccine, one of the only ways to face it at present is to guarantee the best quality of health for patients, so that they can overcome the disease on their own. Therefore, and considering that COVID-19 generally causes damage to the respiratory system (in the form of lung infection), it is essential to ensure the best pulmonary ventilation for the patient. However, depending on the severity of the disease and the health condition of the patient, the situation can become critical when the patient has respiratory distress or becomes unable to breathe on his/her own. In that case, the ventilator becomes the lifeline of the patient. This device must keep patients stable until, on their own or with the help of medications, they manage to overcome the lung infection. However, with thousands or hundreds of thousands of infected patients, no country has enough ventilators. If this situation has become critical in the Global North, it has turned disastrous in developing countries, where ventilators are even more scarce. This article shows the race against time of a multidisciplinary research team at the University of Huelva, UHU, southwest of Spain, to develop an inexpensive, multifunctional, and easy-to-manufacture ventilator, which has been named ResUHUrge. The device meets all medical requirements and is developed with open-source hardware and software.