The PolyVent educational platform: An open mechanical ventilation platform for research and education.

The PolyVent is an open source mechanical ventilator meant for research and education. It prioritizes openness, modularity, repairability, and modifiability. An ESP32 microcontroller controls a proportional valve which precisely modulates pressure and flow from a mixing chamber into the airway. This chamber is fed with pressurized oxygen and medical air. Solenoid valves control both gas mixing and patient inflation. The PolyVent is controllable through a command-line interface over the serial port, a convenient point of access for researchers and instructors. The VentMon, a separate IoT-enabled spirometer, provides convenient instrumentation for classroom teaching and geodistributed research teams. A "cake-dome" design allows the PolyVent to operate with or without its transparent cover in place, for easy troubleshooting and instruction. An open footprint optimizes engineering change rather than compactness. The electronics are packaged into cards on a standardized backplane, allowing one to extend functionality through the addition of new cards. The VentOS open source software that drives the machine makes it a universal and modifiable research software platform. It is intended to be the medical gas production heart of an open source human respiration research and education ecosystem, and aims to be the starting point for open source medical ventilator designs.