Dayo Olakulehin a Nigerian Doctor, has invented a low-cost,mobile,portable and easy to use and rechargeable battery-powered ventilator.
The D-Box, just launched in Lagos, costs around 100 times lesser, than a conventional ventilator at an initial price of US$300. Conventional ventilators cost around $30,000 (about N9 million),affordable alternatives still in progress are to be sold for $3,000.
The Nigerian Doctor Olakulehin, who trained at the College of Medicine University of Lagos (CMUL)/Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), explained that the D-Box needs little or no expertise to use and is powered by a rechargeable battery. D-Box is a joint venture product of the Canadian product development firm Inertia Engineering + Design, headed up by Ray Minato and LigandCorp, owned by Dr. Dayo Olakulehin.
The product was openly endorsed at the Lagos launch by officials from CMUL/LUTH; National Orthopaedic Hospital Igbobi, Lagos; Lagoon Hospital; and Inertia Engineering + Design, Canada. The joint venture is aspiring to get the product into the hands of hospitals and medical centres in the next 16 months.
Olakulehin, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and founder of LigandCorp, disclosed that in resource-limited settings patients may miss due to lack of intensive care beds and mechanical ventilators.Presently,health workers may ventilate patients indefinitely by manually compressing a CPR bag.
“Generally, patients are ventilated manually via ‘pumping by hand’ – a process that is miserably unproductive because of the susceptibility to human error, costly in terms of manpower required to operate,” he said.
He was encouraged to invent the device following the experience of being awakened by the father of a 5 year old child he was manually ventilating. The child had been put at risk of brain damage, and Olakulehin felt there had to be a better way.
Olakulehin expresses that the device is not designed to replace existing ventilators which exist for critical intensive care – it is being introduced to improve the quality of care that is available for the patient. He added: “It is limited presently because it cannot be used for a child, unlike existing ventilators that have different modes, this is only Intermitent Positive Pressure Ventilation, IPPV, but we hope to boost it in the future.”