Thousands of donors every year, Alumni in particular, choose to donate their '5 per mille' to Politecnico di Milano. These donations give new impetus to research and are especially usegul to finance projects with a high social impact and to promote young researchers .
Among these projects there is also MakingMEV (Multiple Emergency Ventilator), a complete reinterpretation of the emergency support for respiratory ventilation: a ventilator capable of supporting the breathing of 10 patients at the same time , safe and customizable for each patient, and able to prevent mechanical ventilator damage.
MakingMEV aims to create the first fully functional prototype of the ventilator, validate its functionality in the laboratory and analyze its realistic potential of being used in a clinical environment.
« The process of bringing a new technology to the clinic passes through a well-coded procedure of approval by the regulatory bodies," explains Alumnus, and researcher at the Politecnico di Milano Beniamino Fiore . "Over the next 18 months we aim to take the first of these steps, namely the validation of the prototype in the laboratory, which will be performed both here at the Politecnico and at the Policlinico di Milano, using simulators to replicate the respiratory biomechanical response of treated patients ".
MakingMEV was created in a multidisciplinary context : «In the project - explains Fiore - researchers from three Departments of the Politecnico provided synergistic skills in bioengineering, mechanical engineering, automation and engineering management. The team is completed by the staff of the Anesthesia and Intensive Care Department of the Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico, which gives its research contribution to the project on a completely voluntary basis ".
The project (we talked about in number 8 and issue 9 of the MAP) has already attracted the interest of various institutions of social utility and bodies active in the promotion of highly sustainable projects.
"The idea emerged during the pandemic wave of early 2020 in Italy. However, the project could be of benefit for emergency situations in general, and especially for less organized health systems in developing countries", and adds "MakingMEV was our reaction to the emergency, our way of saying: “let's do something concrete! “».
