PORTEFEUILLE

Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) lack a sufficient supply of medical ventilators leading to millions of preventable deaths and poor patient outcomes each year. This is further exacerbated by the drastic population growth especially in LMICs and ageing societies across the world.
To address this problem, we develop a ventilator for emergency use, transport, and short-term critical care. For the successful introduction into the market and a sustainable use in low-resource settings, we take a holistic, user-centered approach to design a ventilator that is intuitive to use, robust, and easy to maintain, even in harsh environments. In collaboration with our medical partners, we focus on safe patient care by integrating the ventilator in a training platform to promote medical and technical knowledge in low-resource settings and make the use of our ventilator more accessible. We continuously validate our solution with local stakeholders and experts from all around the world. Eventually, we would like to co-produce the ventilator locally to promote knowledge exchange, strengthen local economies, and build capacity.
As such, we believe that our ventilator can be both an essential piece of medical equipment to advance the state of healthcare in LMICs and a pioneering device that demonstrates how sustainable solutions for essential medical care in challenging settings can be created.

The InnoBooster funding helps us to take the next big step with our validated proof-of-concept ventilator prototype towards pilot production, which is necessary on our path to regulatory certification. It will specifically advance our hardware and controls development following regulatory guidelines, as well as support the planning of a pilot production. So far, we conceptualized our next prototype, focusing on the formal definition of requirements, risks management, and risk mitigations according to applicable norms and standards. More specifically, we updated our hardware and controls concept, following the relevant standard operating procedures that we implemented within the scope of setting up our company Quality Management System (QMS). To ensure the efficiency and appropriate use of our solution, we continuously validate it together with local stakeholders and experts. We conducted several field trips to South Africa, Kenya, and Tanzania in 2023. We also incorporated our company «breathe medical AG» (UID: CHE-146.803.228) end of July and were officially accepted as an ETH Spin-off.
While we are currently preparing the industrialization of our device via establishing partnerships, we are already piloting our digital training platform with potential future customers to grow our network, upskill healthcare professional around the topic of ventilation and emergency care, and build capacity.