How MIT scientist Shriya Srinivasan’s ventilator tech is saving lives

 

When Shriya Srinivasan, a postdoctoral medical researcher at Harvard Medical School, came up with a ventilator multiplexer amidst a raging pandemic, she hoped to solve a million problems with one medical device. At the peak of the pandemic, a shortage of ventilators had patients gasping for breath. Srinivasan’s ventilator-splitter could reduce this requirement by half. 

“The problem with earlier ventilator multiplexer models was that they could not be customized to treat each patient,” Srinivasan told Global Indian in an exclusive interview. “Splitting them uniformly between two patients can be injurious to each patient.” 

What Srinivasan and her cohort of researchers did was incorporate individualized controls. In other words, doctors can now treat two patients with a single ventilator while customizing the settings to suit specific medical requirements.  

Soon after the research was published in the Science Translational Medicine journal, she sought to industrialize the life-saving equipment given the dire global shortage. “We partnered with a Bengaluru-based startup to add a digital monitoring component to the ventilator multiplexer and get it ready for global deployment,” says Srinivasan. 

However, by the time Srinivasan’s splitter hit the market, India’s second wave had begun to ease, leaving the healthcare ecosystem with less appetite and funds for innovation. The Indian American researcher says,  Read More