9 ms·

MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi

95 points by mtmail 6y ago

mtmail 6y ago
Homepage in French https://makair.life/ https://makair.life/ Translation https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https://makair.life/ https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https:/...
chrisseaton 6y ago
I thought everyone decided we didn't need a vast number of ventilators like we thought we would? There was a huge panic for a week last March and a lot of random companies were going to be making them, then it just seemed to go away. Does anyone know if we managed to ramp up normal production or there was some other reason it stopped being an issue? Or maybe the issue didn't go away just the media coverage and they're still trying to use ad-hoc ventilators?
- jschwartzi 6y ago
  GM contracted with one or more actual medical device companies to produce ventilators under the DPA. So yes we needed ventilators, but we produced a ton of them to fulfill that need.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    To be even-handed, both Ford and GM produced ventilators.
- coding123 6y ago
  I've heard directly from doctors that the entire ventilator thing was a huge mistake and ended up causing more death. Treatment is now more focused on statins. The covid shell is basically in your blood clotting everything up - it's a huge ass fat cell that is killing people. Take aspirin. Also help your immune system before and after you get covid by taking Vitamin D, E, K, A, C and Magnesium (helps with D intake issues).
  - SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
    I'd love some articles that back this up - I've seen low Vitamin D be mentioned as a comorbidity, but I don't think generic advice on vitamins and taking aspirin is that useful without any sort of evidence.
    - coding123 6y ago
      Vitamin D https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960076020302764?via%3Dihub#bib0100 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096007602... https://pmj.bmj.com/content/early/2020/11/12/postgradmedj-2020-139065 https://pmj.bmj.com/content/early/2020/11/12/postgradmedj-20... Statins https://health.ucsd.edu/news/releases/Pages/2020-09-23-statins-reduce-covid-19-severity-likely-by-removing-cholesterol-virus-uses-to-infect.aspx https://health.ucsd.edu/news/releases/Pages/2020-09-23-stati... Vitamin A https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/covid-19/iga-antibodies-vitamin-a-and-covid-19 https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/covid-19/iga-antibodies-vitam... More data is probably needed for A. Aspirin https://journals.lww.com/anesthesia-analgesia/Abstract/9000/Aspirin_Use_is_Associated_with_Decreased.95423.aspx https://journals.lww.com/anesthesia-analgesia/Abstract/9000/... Definitely need more data on the aspirin. Vitamin D is pretty well backed up at this point. https://vitamindforall.org/letter.html https://vitamindforall.org/letter.html
    - VBprogrammer 6y ago
      While on the whole you are completely correct, it's worth remembering that the risks associated with taking recommend doses of vitamins are negligible. The only plausible confounding factor is people behaving less responsibility in the belief that they are somehow safe. On a personal level, try not to do that.
      - coding123 6y ago
        This is great advice. If you have a chance to get the vaccine, that's the best option. But keep wearing masks, and try to not get the virus in any ways you can. Vitamins are basically boosting your immune system, and as a bonus there are studies that back up that it actually helps in some cases 77% better outcomes (potentially more). That doesn't mean you can't die from covid even if you're taking these vitamins (as well as with the vaccine).
- pp-ir 6y ago
  As far as I understood doctors, in march there was no guidelines for the disease. It was considered as a respiratory disease. Later on, it was requalified as a vascular disease, scientists looked at cytokines / interleukin (I AM A ELECTRONIC ENGINEER, please correct me doctors). Now, there is some systematic treatments earlier (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2770275 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2770275), so yes, far fewer patients needs an invasive ventilator. And that is great.
- djsumdog 6y ago
  The ventilators were a death sentence. Many of the people who died early on, died not due to COVID, but due to their lungs getting damaged by high pressure vents. Some were kept on high pressure for much longer than is normal. There was a lot of bad advice coming from doctors in Europe, and also there was the idea if you had them on a vent, they were on a closed air system and couldn't spread COVID in the hospital. This was disastrous. Doctors do not use them unless necessary today, but it's no doubt this is why many of the early death counts, especially among younger people, was so high in places with high vent use.
  - hkt 6y ago
    Can you cite anything on this? I've heard it claimed before but haven't seen a primary source.
  - corin_ 6y ago
    Could you please share any sources? I know they're not used as much now but haven't seen any evidence that they are specifically to blame for deaths. The majority conclusion I've seen in Europe about why earlier death rates were so high in some places was that the hospitals were overloaded and therefore didn't have enough capacity (staff, equipment, etc) and therefore some died due to there not being enough ventilators. This isn't my field of expertise so I'm very open to finding out that my impression is wrong, but my gut feeling is that your comment is not accurate.
    - war1025 6y ago
      I don't have any sources at hand, but the explanation I heard is that ventilators are generally used for people who have healthy lung tissue but are unable to breathe properly. Coronavirus weakens the lung tissue, but the ability to breathe (inhale / exhale) is unaffected. Basically the body was forcing people to have shallow breath to preserve the damaged lung tissue and allow it to recover. The ventilator essentially restored their breathing back to full force, which turned people's lungs into soup basically. Makes sense as an explanation to me, but like I said, I don't have any official sources for that.
baptistejamin 6y ago
You can also find the project on GitHub: https://github.com/makers-for-life/makair https://github.com/makers-for-life/makair
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pp-ir 6y ago
=> HN effect, the server is sloooow. Sorry. Pierre, the author of this article.
sahin 6y ago
Great work. I am a big fan of Raspberry pi. For hospital environment does raspberry pi have the reliability, stability and durability for health use case for real life environments? it will be so budget friendly, i am sure many hospitals in the world can use it...
- mbreese 6y ago
  My initial reaction was to say that there is no way the RPi would be reliable enough for clinical purposes. However, from the schematics, it looks like the RPi is only used for displaying the airflow curves and not used to control the ventilating. A microcontroller is used for that critical function. If this is the case, then this would make the reliability much better and there is a chance it could be useful to many places. If the SD card on the Pi dies (which, if they are logging the data to SD and not RAM, is a likely event), then they can have spare SDs available as part of the standard operating procedure. It's not ideal, but so long as the main microcontroller is functioning, the display could be considered non-critical. Although, ICU staff might disagree...
  - baptistejamin 6y ago
    It's why there is a second board to handle critical tasks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25671318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25671318
    - mbreese 6y ago
      If I could ask -- I saw a LoRA circuit mentioned in the schematics... what is that used for?
      - pp-ir 6y ago
        Good question! The plan was to use it for the central alarm room in temporary hospitals where no network exists. We planned to develop a small gateway to gather all the devices alarms, linked to bed number. It was not developed, but hardware has the feature. The LoRa fairness will allow very few data to come up, but high level alarms vital could be transmitted several times in a second if needed. We know we cannot use it to transfer waveforms of course.
koolk3ychain 6y ago
This is interesting, however, if I had covid and knew I was going to soon be on a ventilator. I'd much rather overdose on morphine or kill myself than rely on a raspberry pi based ventilator.
- Aissen 6y ago
  Yeah, the title is misguided, it is not the whole story : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25671318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25671318 (And as much as I hate the Pi's reliability, I'd still take that bet if it was indeed relying on a Pi).
- baptistejamin 6y ago
  Hello! I work on this project. Don't worry, the breathing system does not rely on the Rasberry at all. We use an electronic board that was made on purpose by a Medical company and relies on STM32 hardware. This board sends telemetry to the Rasberry PI and we have a Rust based interface that shows charts and some controls. If the Raspberry fails, the Firmware still run fine, and you can still change the settings on the machine using physical buttons and a LCD screen that is directly connected to the firmware
  - koolk3ychain 6y ago
    A good friend of mine had the experience of nearly dying after a mobile ventilator in an ambulance failed after he was involved in a serious car accident. It was later found that the ambulance operator was using devices that hadn't been cleared by the FDA yet. Although they came from a Turkish "medical device" company, they were not cleared for use in the US and left my friend with brain damage and PTSD. I don't care that the hardware involved in your project was "made be a medical company", it's not hardened tech. Also, rust is by no means hardened - look into "provably complete" languages if you want to see what a true "hardened" lang is. There's a reason why medical devices and serious "hardened" tech (military or otherwise) is validated and cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's because teams of engineers spent weeks or years coming up with every possible problem or failure pattern. To be frank, I'd rather pay a nurse $50k in cash to pump a vent bag next to me than rely on your "project".
franky47 6y ago
Note: the project was started during the first lockdown by the staff of Clever Cloud [1], a French PaaS based in Nantes. [1] https://clever-cloud.com https://clever-cloud.com

95 points by mtmail 6y ago

Homepage in French https://makair.life/ https://makair.life/ Translation https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https://makair.life/ https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https:/...

chrisseaton 6y ago

I thought everyone decided we didn't need a vast number of ventilators like we thought we would? There was a huge panic for a week last March and a lot of random companies were going to be making them, then it just seemed to go away. Does anyone know if we managed to ramp up normal production or there was some other reason it stopped being an issue? Or maybe the issue didn't go away just the media coverage and they're still trying to use ad-hoc ventilators?

jschwartzi 6y ago
GM contracted with one or more actual medical device companies to produce ventilators under the DPA. So yes we needed ventilators, but we produced a ton of them to fulfill that need.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  To be even-handed, both Ford and GM produced ventilators.
coding123 6y ago
I've heard directly from doctors that the entire ventilator thing was a huge mistake and ended up causing more death. Treatment is now more focused on statins. The covid shell is basically in your blood clotting everything up - it's a huge ass fat cell that is killing people. Take aspirin. Also help your immune system before and after you get covid by taking Vitamin D, E, K, A, C and Magnesium (helps with D intake issues).
- SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
  I'd love some articles that back this up - I've seen low Vitamin D be mentioned as a comorbidity, but I don't think generic advice on vitamins and taking aspirin is that useful without any sort of evidence.
  - coding123 6y ago
    Vitamin D https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960076020302764?via%3Dihub#bib0100 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096007602... https://pmj.bmj.com/content/early/2020/11/12/postgradmedj-2020-139065 https://pmj.bmj.com/content/early/2020/11/12/postgradmedj-20... Statins https://health.ucsd.edu/news/releases/Pages/2020-09-23-statins-reduce-covid-19-severity-likely-by-removing-cholesterol-virus-uses-to-infect.aspx https://health.ucsd.edu/news/releases/Pages/2020-09-23-stati... Vitamin A https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/covid-19/iga-antibodies-vitamin-a-and-covid-19 https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/covid-19/iga-antibodies-vitam... More data is probably needed for A. Aspirin https://journals.lww.com/anesthesia-analgesia/Abstract/9000/Aspirin_Use_is_Associated_with_Decreased.95423.aspx https://journals.lww.com/anesthesia-analgesia/Abstract/9000/... Definitely need more data on the aspirin. Vitamin D is pretty well backed up at this point. https://vitamindforall.org/letter.html https://vitamindforall.org/letter.html
  - VBprogrammer 6y ago
    While on the whole you are completely correct, it's worth remembering that the risks associated with taking recommend doses of vitamins are negligible. The only plausible confounding factor is people behaving less responsibility in the belief that they are somehow safe. On a personal level, try not to do that.
    - coding123 6y ago
      This is great advice. If you have a chance to get the vaccine, that's the best option. But keep wearing masks, and try to not get the virus in any ways you can. Vitamins are basically boosting your immune system, and as a bonus there are studies that back up that it actually helps in some cases 77% better outcomes (potentially more). That doesn't mean you can't die from covid even if you're taking these vitamins (as well as with the vaccine).
pp-ir 6y ago
As far as I understood doctors, in march there was no guidelines for the disease. It was considered as a respiratory disease. Later on, it was requalified as a vascular disease, scientists looked at cytokines / interleukin (I AM A ELECTRONIC ENGINEER, please correct me doctors). Now, there is some systematic treatments earlier (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2770275 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2770275), so yes, far fewer patients needs an invasive ventilator. And that is great.
djsumdog 6y ago
The ventilators were a death sentence. Many of the people who died early on, died not due to COVID, but due to their lungs getting damaged by high pressure vents. Some were kept on high pressure for much longer than is normal. There was a lot of bad advice coming from doctors in Europe, and also there was the idea if you had them on a vent, they were on a closed air system and couldn't spread COVID in the hospital. This was disastrous. Doctors do not use them unless necessary today, but it's no doubt this is why many of the early death counts, especially among younger people, was so high in places with high vent use.
- hkt 6y ago
  Can you cite anything on this? I've heard it claimed before but haven't seen a primary source.
- corin_ 6y ago
  Could you please share any sources? I know they're not used as much now but haven't seen any evidence that they are specifically to blame for deaths. The majority conclusion I've seen in Europe about why earlier death rates were so high in some places was that the hospitals were overloaded and therefore didn't have enough capacity (staff, equipment, etc) and therefore some died due to there not being enough ventilators. This isn't my field of expertise so I'm very open to finding out that my impression is wrong, but my gut feeling is that your comment is not accurate.
  - war1025 6y ago
    I don't have any sources at hand, but the explanation I heard is that ventilators are generally used for people who have healthy lung tissue but are unable to breathe properly. Coronavirus weakens the lung tissue, but the ability to breathe (inhale / exhale) is unaffected. Basically the body was forcing people to have shallow breath to preserve the damaged lung tissue and allow it to recover. The ventilator essentially restored their breathing back to full force, which turned people's lungs into soup basically. Makes sense as an explanation to me, but like I said, I don't have any official sources for that.

baptistejamin 6y ago

You can also find the project on GitHub: https://github.com/makers-for-life/makair https://github.com/makers-for-life/makair

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pp-ir 6y ago

=> HN effect, the server is sloooow. Sorry. Pierre, the author of this article.

sahin 6y ago

Great work. I am a big fan of Raspberry pi. For hospital environment does raspberry pi have the reliability, stability and durability for health use case for real life environments? it will be so budget friendly, i am sure many hospitals in the world can use it...

mbreese 6y ago
My initial reaction was to say that there is no way the RPi would be reliable enough for clinical purposes. However, from the schematics, it looks like the RPi is only used for displaying the airflow curves and not used to control the ventilating. A microcontroller is used for that critical function. If this is the case, then this would make the reliability much better and there is a chance it could be useful to many places. If the SD card on the Pi dies (which, if they are logging the data to SD and not RAM, is a likely event), then they can have spare SDs available as part of the standard operating procedure. It's not ideal, but so long as the main microcontroller is functioning, the display could be considered non-critical. Although, ICU staff might disagree...
- baptistejamin 6y ago
  It's why there is a second board to handle critical tasks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25671318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25671318
  - mbreese 6y ago
    If I could ask -- I saw a LoRA circuit mentioned in the schematics... what is that used for?
    - pp-ir 6y ago
      Good question! The plan was to use it for the central alarm room in temporary hospitals where no network exists. We planned to develop a small gateway to gather all the devices alarms, linked to bed number. It was not developed, but hardware has the feature. The LoRa fairness will allow very few data to come up, but high level alarms vital could be transmitted several times in a second if needed. We know we cannot use it to transfer waveforms of course.

koolk3ychain 6y ago

This is interesting, however, if I had covid and knew I was going to soon be on a ventilator. I'd much rather overdose on morphine or kill myself than rely on a raspberry pi based ventilator.

Aissen 6y ago
Yeah, the title is misguided, it is not the whole story : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25671318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25671318 (And as much as I hate the Pi's reliability, I'd still take that bet if it was indeed relying on a Pi).
baptistejamin 6y ago
Hello! I work on this project. Don't worry, the breathing system does not rely on the Rasberry at all. We use an electronic board that was made on purpose by a Medical company and relies on STM32 hardware. This board sends telemetry to the Rasberry PI and we have a Rust based interface that shows charts and some controls. If the Raspberry fails, the Firmware still run fine, and you can still change the settings on the machine using physical buttons and a LCD screen that is directly connected to the firmware
- koolk3ychain 6y ago
  A good friend of mine had the experience of nearly dying after a mobile ventilator in an ambulance failed after he was involved in a serious car accident. It was later found that the ambulance operator was using devices that hadn't been cleared by the FDA yet. Although they came from a Turkish "medical device" company, they were not cleared for use in the US and left my friend with brain damage and PTSD. I don't care that the hardware involved in your project was "made be a medical company", it's not hardened tech. Also, rust is by no means hardened - look into "provably complete" languages if you want to see what a true "hardened" lang is. There's a reason why medical devices and serious "hardened" tech (military or otherwise) is validated and cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's because teams of engineers spent weeks or years coming up with every possible problem or failure pattern. To be frank, I'd rather pay a nurse $50k in cash to pump a vent bag next to me than rely on your "project".

franky47 6y ago

Note: the project was started during the first lockdown by the staff of Clever Cloud [1], a French PaaS based in Nantes. [1] https://clever-cloud.com https://clever-cloud.com