Accelerating Emergency Ventilator Development

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government asked technology companies to rapidly design and manufacure tens of thousands of emergency ventilators to meet the predicted shortfall in the UK’s ventilator capacity. This would involve compressing a work program that would usually take several years into only a few weeks. This presentation covers how Simulink^®, Simscape™, and other MathWorks tools were used to support, enable, and accelerate a number of workstreams such as:

• Maturing the pneumatic architecture design
• Understanding the effect of specific component non-ideal behaviour
• Developing and validating a full suite of clinical alarm algorithms
• Developing and validating a Spontaneous Breathing algorithm

Cambridge Consultants discuss how they were able to accelerate development through implementing a comprehensive system model with the use of Simscape and Stateflow^®. Using hardware-in-the-loop testing enabled by Simulink Desktop Real-Time™ allowed additional value to be extracted from the system model as a number of algorithms could be rapidly protoyped within simulation before being deployed to representative hardware. The team explains how they were able to overcome challenges presented by the system architecture and changing requirements to successfully develop and deploy a Spontaneous Breathing algorithm, enabling a number of additional clinical modes in less than two weeks.