Development of Low-Cost Portable Defibrillator for Sudden Cardiac Arrest Management

Abstract

Defibrillation is the mainstay of treatment of cardiac arrest especially ventricular fibrillation (VF) which occurs in more than 70%. The survival in out of hospital cardiac arrest is 30–35% in the western world whereas it is low in low socioeconomic countries. At present patients/persons suffering from cardiac arrest especially outside the hospital settings has high mortality of 70% or more. As per American Heart Association guidelines, early defibrillation within minutes is the prime treatment to improve the survival. In a country like India, defibrillators are not available and it may take hours for a victim to reach appropriate centres for defibrillation causing loss of life. However, defibrillators are currently expensive, not readily available. In a vast country, it is difficult for patient to access the major hospitals, lack of beds and other facility causes delay in treatment and death of patients. Hence there is high demand for the development of an alternate defibrillator readily available everywhere. The aim of this paper is development of a low-cost portable disposable defibrillator for the management of cardiac arrest victims. The design consists of an encasing a portable battery with capacitor which stores and delivers biphasic shock of 50 J for paediatric and 150 J for adult via two paddles attached to the assembly. Up to 6 shocks can be delivered with the stored energy. The casing will have a facility to view the heart rhythm such as VF and sinus rhythm via small display. Hence the project is aimed to develop a low-cost ultraportable defibrillator that aims to provide widespread availability, early defibrillation and improve survival. The proposed diagnosing system in hardware design was tested on safety analyser and defibrillator analysers in Clinical Engineering department of Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology (SCTIMST) and the accuracy was achieved of 98.03%.