A collection of validation test for for emergency covid19 ventilators (clinical usability and suitability as per RMVS)
This the public home of a Google Sheet containing ~74 validation tests built around the UK's excellent and concise standard for Rapidly Manufactured Ventilator System. This spreadsheet is also available in Open Document format and Microsoft Excel format, though those may be slightly out-of-date with the Google Sheet version.
By manually performing all of the mandatory and/or optional tests in the spreadsheet, partial confidence that a ventilator is suitable for "last resort" use in a the COVID-19 crisis can be obtained.
This test suite tests usability be a clinician with some familiarity with ventilators and some training on the specific device. It is not meant for home usage.
This document is released under Creative Commons CC0 Universal, which in the USA is equivalent to placing it in the public domain. You may do anything you want with it, including removing our names.
We intend teams from different nations and with different needs to modify or extend these tests for their own purposes. If you create a modified copy, you can send it to us here and we will publish it for others to you. For example, one might want versions of the tests in languages other than English (LotE). Or, as time evolves, the standards may change and therefore the tests may change.
This was initiated by Nariman Poushin and Robert L. Read of Public Invention as part of our work in the slack team at Endcoronavirus.org, where it became apparent early on that testing was the biggest missing gap in the open-source ventilator projects. Juan E. (Enrique) Villacres Perez laboriously completed the suite. The European engineers at Breath of Life did a loose sanity check.
We have additionally created a large list of projects and a rubrik for evaluating them. That site also has a huge list of resources related to COVID-19 pandemic ventilators. Additionally, we have started a project VentMon, to build an inline test and monitoring device. That repo currently houses our overall strategy for giving clinicians sufficient confidence to actually deploy ventilators, though this test suite is an important part of that effort.
Public Invention is a small, all-volunteer 501(c)3 US public charity. Your small donation is a stamp of approval for our work that will really help us.