Low-Cost Health Tech: Your Phone Can Now Function As a Ventilator

Imagine living in a hospital for more than five years, with a life confined to the same space, seeing the same faces day in and day out.

In the neurosurgery ward at AIIMS, many patients including 19-year-old Sachin Sharma, have spent years together in that same cubicle. Their parents and families have paused their lives and camp there to take care of them. The only thing stopping them from going home is that they need long-term ventilator support.

Now, a low-cost, user-friendly portable ventilator has made it possible for Sachin to finally go home after five years. It’s touted to be the world’s cheapest, while providing the same quality and functioning as that of a traditional ventilator. And to top it, you can run it via your Android phone.

AIIMs neurosurgeon Dr Deepak Aggarwal and 26-year-old robotics scientist Professor Diwakar Vaish have developed the low-cost portable ventilator.

“If I rewind around two years back it all started with discharging this patient, Sachin. We gathered around that patient and said ‘Listen, he’s there in AIIMS for the last 4 years and we need to discharge him and we need to make a device that he can take back home,’” recalls Vaish.

One thing we realised is that most patients and their relatives own a smartphone. And we wanted to make something that’s user-friendly. So we designed an app.

It is priced it at less than Rs 50,000. And the running cost is “less than that of a tube light”.

There is no cost-effective ventilator available in India. The cheapest portable ventilators cost around Rs 4-5 lakh. And most of them are bulky, require technical expertise, and not at all user-friendly. Our ventilator overcomes all these problems.

Dr Deepak Aggarwal

Traditional ventilators require external oxygen supply and medical air, which increases the resources required to run it. Whereas, AgVa Healthcare’s portable ventilator can run off the room air and provide ventilation.

All these features make it very easy for patients and families to take it home instead of having to live in the hospital.

In Sachin’s case, it has changed the family’s life for the better. When he was in the hospital for five years, his father, a small business owner and the sole earner in the family shut shop due to regular hospital visits.

Having him back at home, now, they can take care of their son and run their house easily. “Sachin too is happier at home since he can stay with his sister and all of us,” Kishan Lal Sharma says about his son.

The innovators plan to address an acute shortage in India’s healthcare delivery system.

“There’s acute scarcity and I would suppose that around a million ventilators are urgently required across India right now. So here, our ventilator fits in perfectly because it can be used at home, hospital wards, ICUs as an advanced ventilator, as well as ambulances,” explains Dr Aggarwal.

Since, there is no regulatory body and guidelines focusing on medical devices like these, they haven’t gotten specific approval but the device is ISO certified, and adheres to European and global standards. They are looking to acquire FDA approval.

Cameraperson: Nitin Chopra, Abhishek Ranjan and Sumit Badola
Video Editor: Prashant Chauhan