French-made hospital respirator revolutionises global healthcare

At the peak of the Covid crisis there were real fears that respirators, the machines which help very sick people to breathe, would be in short supply.

Many big name firms including Dyson and the sports car manufacturer McLaren concentrated efforts on designing and making them.

However it is a French invention, called MakAir, which actually reached production stage and is now being used in hospitals worldwide – at a price five times cheaper than traditional respirators.

Leftover machines have even been sent to Ukrainian hospitals.

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French team

At its conception the team behind it numbered six, headed by Professor Pierre-Antoine Gourraud, a geneticist at the University Hospital of Nantes and a researcher at Nantes University.

He was called up by Quentin Adam, an IT specialist, who had rallied four other technicians with the aim of making an ‘open-source’ respirator.

‘Open-source’ is the name given to technology which is not patented and where the code and instructions are freely available on the internet.

“It was just by chance that he had my number, but when he explained what they wanted to do I saw the possibilities straight away,” Prof Gourraud told The Connexion.

“I knew some of the complexities of having machines certified for hospital use, so immediately I insisted on documentation of every step, which was a bit of a shock because that was not the way they were used to working.

“Eventually we had 300 pages, which is now the basis of the building, installing and operating manual.”

The core of the work was done in April 2020 in a 30-hour ‘hackathon,’ which saw 250 volunteers write the code and design and engineer the machines. This was followed by three weeks building prototypes and three months to get the machines fully certified by health authorities.

Normally it takes at least three years before a new respirator design is certified.

“It was a very French way of working,” said Prof Gourraud.

“The rules and bureaucracy were there, in place, but collectively we were able to work within them, stretching some to their limit, and in a short space of time come up with something which works well, all for the collective good.”

In their use of digital technology and 3D-printed parts, MakAir respirators are in some ways ahead of commercial respirators, claims Prof Gourraud.

The electronic chip used to control them is easily available, and if the power is cut, two lead/sulphur scooter batteries take over and last three hours.

The open source nature of the project makes it difficult to know exactly where they are used, but Prof Gourraud knows they have been sent to Madagascar, Iran, Indonesia – and Ukraine.

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MakAir in Ukraine

“After the Russian invasion I was involved in a drive to get medicines into the country,” he said. “There were 75 of our machines in the hospital, so I sent them on.

“Every six months I would send an email asking if there were any technical issues we could help with, without hearing back.

“Then one day a young Ukrainian engineering student came to the university and I asked if he could help. He called every hospital on the list and discovered some Ukrainian hospitals had the machines and they were working fine, some had them but did not know how they worked, and around a quarter had fallen into Russian hands.

“With his help we were able to hold online training seminars for hospitals, so more could be put to work. It is a crisis machine in a crisis situation.”

Another use for the machines has been found by an entrepreneur in the south of France, who sells them for instruction purposes to schools and universities, charging €2,500.

And the project has also been included in the Bac S exam, where technology and electronics students study the machine and how it was made.