Recent advances in low-cost, portable automated resuscitator systems to fight COVID-19.

World is fighting one of its greatest battle against COVID-19 (a highly infectious disease), leading to death of hundreds of thousands of people around the world, with severe patients requiring artificial breathing. To overcome the shortage of ventilators in medical infrastructure, various low-cost, easy to assemble, portable ventilators have been proposed to fight the ongoing pandemic. These mechanical ventilators are made from components that are generally readily available worldwide. Such components are already associated with day-to-day gadgets or items and which do not require specialized manufacturing processes. Various designs have been proposed, focussing on meeting basic requirements for artificial ventilation to fight the ongoing pandemic. But some people are against the usage of these mechanical ventilators in real-life situations, owing to poor reliability and inability of these designs to meet certain clinical requirements. Each design has its own merits and demerits, which need to be addressed for proper designing. Therefore, this article aims to provide readers an overview of various design parameters that needs to be considered while designing portable ventilators, by systematic analysis from available pool of proposed designs. By going through existing literature, we have recognized multiple factors influencing device performance and how these factors need to be considered for efficient device operation.

Negative pressure aerosol containment box: An innovation to reduce COVID-19 infection risk in healthcare workers.

Healthcare workers (HCW's) are at increased risk of corona virus disease (COVID-19) infection during aerosol generating activities. The aerosol box has been used during intubation and extubation to prevent transmission of infection to HCWs. Isolation room with negative pressure has been advocated for COVID-19 patients. The described containment box has been designed to be useful in COVID intensive care unit (ICU) as a multipurpose box which is a cost effective and readily available resource. This innovation combines the containment box with negative pressure generation using central vacuum.