CERN has established a task force to identify and support contributions from the Organization’s 18 000-strong global community to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
A team of physicists, engineers and technicians from the LHCb collaboration, supported by several LHCb institutions and CERN services, has developed a novel streamlined ventilator, called HEV. As the pandemic spreads, the number of hospitalised patients requiring ventilators has led to a global shortage of supplies. The team realised that the types of systems used to regulate gas flows for particle physics detectors could be used to design a novel ventilator. The HEV design could be used for patients in mild or recovery phases, enabling the more high-end machines to be freed up for the most intensive cases. It is a safety-first design, intended to satisfy clinical requirements for the most requested ventilation modes for COVID-19 patients.
Learn more in the CERN news, in the CERN Courier article, in the LHCb video, and in the original publication.