NASA has licensed three Indian companies to manufacture its ventilators for critical COVID-19 patients.
The three companies are Alpha Design Technologies Pvt Ltd, Bharat Forge Ltd, and Medha Servo Drives Pvt Ltd. The space organisation revealed these names in a special statement on Friday.
NASA selected 21 companies from around the world. These included 3 Indian, 8 American and 3 Brazilian firms to manufacture the equipment.
NASA, designed the ventilator for COVID-19 patients at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JLP) in Southern California. These high-pressure ventilators are simple and affordable options for treating critical patients, and therefore, freeing traditional ventilators for others. In addition, the ventilators have flexible designs that can be modified for field hospital usages.
The idea of licensing their technology excited VITAL, the ventilator developing team.
A prototype of the JPL device was tested by the Human Simulation Lab at Mount Sinai on April 23. The modified design uses compressed air and is suitable for deployment by various kinds of hospitals. The UCLA Simulation Center in Los Angeles also tested the technology, and gave it the green flag.
Even when tested on a high-fidelity lung simulator on 20 different ventilator settings, the ventilator performed exceedingly well. Thus, proving that the ventilator could perform in a number of different scenarios that could be recorded in critically ill patients in an ICU.