The research team says one challenge with the heated high flow nasal cannula oxygen treatment, and some other respiratory therapies, is that they may result in aerosolization, or the production of airborne particles and tiny liquid droplets of the virus, putting health care workers at a higher risk of exposure. Delivering heated high flow nasal cannula oxygen, which is 60 liters of oxygen per minute to the nasal and oral cavity, might spare or delay the need for a ventilator, or may allow them to be liberated from a ventilator earlier."īassin adds this could afford more ventilators to those who urgently need them. "We now know that patients infected with COVID-19 will present with severe hypoxia, or low levels of oxygen in their bloodstream. "Our understanding has evolved rapidly as we've gotten more experience with the disease," Bassin says. The research team says it is lightweight, disposable and has a retractable face shield, allowing easy access to the mouth for food and hygienic needs.
The system draws oxygen, as well as room air, into the helmet, while pulling exhaled air and any other outflow through a high efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter, clearing it of the virus. The device they landed on utilizes existing industrial products to create a personal negative pressure environment wherever the patient is located, and it maintains that environment even if the patient requires movement, such as imaging, testing, use of the restroom or transport. They worked for weeks, creating prototypes out of a store bought vacuum cleaner motor and various different helmets. "We knew we needed to completely enclose the nose and mouth so that everything the wearer is breathing is contained."
"Initial discussions were inspired by an astronaut's helmet with a hose," Kota says. The idea for the device was cultivated by a team of engineers and clinicians, led by Ward and Sridhar Kota, Ph.D., a professor of mechanical engineering at U-M. "This is a creative solution that has been re-engineered to protect health care workers, spare ventilators and allow therapies to be delivered outside of negative pressure rooms, which are expensive to build and a limited resource in health systems," says Benjamin Bassin, M.D., an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Michigan Medicine, director of the Joyce and Don Massey Family Foundation Emergency Critical Care Center (EC3), and one of the team members leading the project.
#Negative pressure room guidelines bedside patient care portable#
To help with the COVID-19 pandemic, University of Michigan researchers have developed a new, portable and mass-producible helmet system that can potentially transform any hospital bed into a negative pressure room, while protecting caregivers, and sparing ventilators for the most critical cases.īuilt largely from commercially-available parts, the innovation's compact design effectively isolates COVID-19 positive patients and allows for more liberal use of aggressive respiratory treatments, while decreasing the risk of potential exposure to the virus to health care providers. "Rapidly depleting supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE), dwindling access to negative pressure rooms and limited stock of mechanical ventilators pose a threat to patients and a strain on health care systems," says Kevin Ward, M.D., a professor of emergency medicine and executive director of the Michigan Center for Integrative Research in Critical Care (MCIRCC).
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