A team of physicians at the Boston-based hospital and researchers at Cambridge-based MIT jointly developed the system, dubbed the individualized system for augmenting ventilator efficiency, or iSAVE for short. The team is working to get emergency use authorization from the FDA to help ease ventilator shortages in hospitals around the globe due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
iSAVE aims to solve the challenge of air supply, which typically cannot meet two patients’ individual needs when sharing a ventilator. While iSAVE is not the standard of care, it can help in extreme circumstances such as the current pandemic, said Giovanni Traverso, PhD, assistant professor at MIT, according to the report.
“These kinds of solutions are ones that one might contemplate when there are no other options. … The way that we see it, [this] is a tool that at least adds to that conversation and consideration,” Dr. Traverso said.
There are issues that could come from a system such as iSAVE, including increasing the chance that one of the patients becomes disconnected from the ventilator, according to Richard Branson, surgery department professor at the University of Cincinnati and co-author of two recent studies on ventilator-sharing.
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