Designing the user interface of a ventilator under the constraints of a pandemic

Abstract

Abstract This paper reports on the design of the GUI component of the PV1000, a fully-functional, cost-efficient pandemic ventilator developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our main objective in designing the user interface was to expose the rich features of the ventilator, which are on-par with many commercial medical devices, through an interface that is simple to use even by medical staff with little prior experience with ventilators. We present an agile development process which is intended to address the fast changing and potentially unclear requirements of a pandemic. This is to address the specific situation where domain experts as well as specific hardware have shortages, resulting in recurring changes in requirements. This occurs in conjunction with the collaboration of developers, not all of whom are familiar with the development of medical devices. Despite the pandemic situation, we have made a deliberate decision to use existing software engineering tools such as continuous integration. Additionally, we are employing a multi-platform development framework in order to utilise the resulting advantages, for example, if there are changes in requirements. We present and discuss the system, hardware and software architecture of the components that allow users to interact with the device. The focus here is on the dynamic generation of parts of the software architecture, which enables rapid adaptation to changing conditions on the part of the software. The user interface is evaluated through a user survey, where the majority of participants describe the interface as clear and intuitive. The entire ventilator was evaluated in one animal trial and fortunately never had to be used on humans. The next step is to convert the setup into an open source project that can be used as a research platform for ventilators.