In mid-March of 2020, COVID-19 patients flooded into hospitals. The severity of the outbreak became apparent as the number of cases climbed upwards at an alarming rate. Medical supplies were dwindling, and early reports out of New York and Seattle indicated a critical ICU bed shortage, with a ventilator shortage looming on the horizon. The United States healthcare system was not prepared for the scope of this public health crisis. The world was not ready for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tyler Mantel, a robotics entrepreneur at MassRobotics in Boston, recognized that there was something he could do in the midst of the crisis. He paused what he was working on and founded TVP Health to begin addressing the immediate ventilator shortage.

Ventilators are mechanical breathing machines. They oxygenate the blood when a patient is unable to breathe for themselves, a crucial lifesaving tool for the most critical cases of respiratory distress. In one of the first large-scale studies from Wuhan, the New England Journal of Medicine recorded that about 2.3% of COVID-19 patients need a ventilator to stay alive. A March report from the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins revealed that there were about 160,000 ventilators available for patient care, yet estimates from the Imperial College London predicted that if the COVID-19 trajectory continues, demand for ventilators in the US would be 30 times current supply. Even as mitigation efforts start to slow the spread of the virus, demand is likely to grow above eight times current supply.

Mantel recruited a team of more than 15 engineers to rapidly prototype a low-cost ventilator for global distribution. Since then, TVP Health has grown to encompass over 200 volunteers serving a wide range of functions across departments.

“We have certain skills that some people don’t have. As a team, we can help solve this ventilator shortage rapidly before things get out of hand,” says Mantel. “There are two key problems that we really need to solve: affordable ventilator production and fast ventilator distribution.”

TVP developed a ventilator, AIRA, to meet the specific needs of a coronavirus patient- Our novel design process enables basic ventilator functions without the bells and whistles. This allows us to keep costs low and sell our ventilator at approximately half the cost of an average ventilator.

Now that TVP Health’s ventilator has been developed and authorized by the FDA (under the Emergency Use Authorization Process), the company will begin work with strategic partners to manufacture and distribute our devices efficiently.

If you would like to contribute the cause, we are accepting donations through our Donation Page. *TVP Health is a 501(C)(3) tax-exempt organization.

If you think that you might be a good strategic partner for us or would like to help in another way please email us at info@tvphealth.org

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