Remembering Medical Ventilators and Masks in the Days of COVID-19: Patenting in the Last Decade in Respiratory Technologies

Abstract

Health systems, which have been under great pressure with the COVID-19 outbreak, encountered problems in accessing some urgently needed medical resources. One of these resources has been the medical ventilators needed in acute respiratory distress syndrome developing with COVID-19. As a result of the calls made, many manufacturers have modified their facilities to produce medical ventilators and the problem has been solved to a great extent. While we focus on the urgent requirement for ventilators in these troubled days of COVID-19, we do not seem to be worth discussing their technical developments. How did the countries perform in the development of novel respiratory technologies in the pre-COVID period? While patents are seen as a measure of inventive activity, we attempt to draw a general picture of patents granted in the field of medical respiratory technologies. Our study examines 27 397 respiratory patents listed in the Derwent Innovations Index database at the last 50 years and focuses on the last decade for further evaluation. In addition to the analysis of patent numbers, we identified the core ventilation technologies of the last two decades with the topic modeling technique and compared them. We used the claims section of the patents collected. It is seen that focus of ventilation patents granted between 2001 and 2010 was on oxygen, flow generation, and pressure sensors while it shifted to the pipes, measurement methods, and plates between 2011 and 2020.