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On Nov. 14, Mexico exceeded 1 million cases of COVID-19, and this number continues to increase. Adrian Gutierrez, a senior in Engineering Plus: Mechanical Engineering, spent Summer 2020 developing an automated bag valve mask with Kopar, an industrial automation company in Monterrey, Mexico. 

Gutierrez started working on this project in the spring as part of his component design course, and he continued the project into the summer through an internship with Kopar.
“We knew since the beginning that we weren’t going to replace the ventilator”, Gutierrez said, “so we constrained our design on the bag valve mask, which is a product mostly used in ambulances for people that need breathing assistance.”

Bag valve masks are hand-held devices that are used to provide positive pressure ventilation to patients that are having difficulty breathing. 

The aim of developing the automated bag valve mask was to provide a more affordable product to COVID-19 patients who weren’t critical enough to require a ventilator, but would benefit greatly from assisted ventilation. Gutierrez said, “Our main goal was to make this really accessible for everyone. A ventilator costs around $60,000 and this costs around $2,000.”

Gutierrez worked on the lower cost design with a team of six engineers at Kopar. Their model had to incorporate several challenging aspects including the compression mechanism, which has to vary compression rates and oxygen percentages according to the particular needs of every patient. To accommodate these constraints, the team developed a screen interface to allow the user to select the necessary settings for oxygen flow. This required multiple fluid calculations and sensors that Gutierrez helped develop.

“If I needed a bag valve mask, I would use it myself”, Gutierrez said. “All the products we used are super industrial, so the probability of them failing was really low. It is super robust and also portable.”

After the design was finished, Kopar handed the project to Gutierrez to pursue a development grant from the Mexican government. Due to stiff competition, the Kopar team was unfortunately denied the grant. “If we got the grant we would’ve been able to work with the health department”, said Gutierrez.

Gutierrez looked into having his device be medically certified through private hospitals, but his team was ultimately deterred by the legal concerns and bureaucratic hurdles involved in the process. “Our goal wasn’t to be involved with the legal stuff, so we had to stop the medical certification of the device”, said Gutierrez. He emphasized that while he was disappointed, he is proud of the work he has done. “Our main goal wasn’t to make profit from it either. We just wanted to get our idea validated and that’s what we did.”