On the same day I passed my transfer viva, I joined the OxVent project to contribute my engineering skills in response to the coronavirus outbreak. The Covid-19 pandemic has created huge demand for hospital ventilators. In our endeavour to tackle the acute shortage we, a multidisciplinary team of engineers and medics at the University of Oxford and King’s College London, are developing a rapidly deployable ventilator. We have been working day and night to design a simple, safe and scalable solution with off-the-shelf components to be produced at a large scale in a relatively short period of time.

The OxVent has been shortlisted by the UK government to move to the next stage of testing – in less than a fortnight after the initial brainstorming! If, after thorough testing, the prototype satisfies the safety requirements set by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), our ventilator will be produced in collaboration with the medical manufacturing company Smith and Nephew (S&N) and then deployed through the NHS.

Annika Möslein (2018, DPhil Engineering), Department of Engineering Science, Multifunctional Materials & Composites Laboratory. She is a recipient of the Oxford-Ashton Graduate Scholarship, which is supported by the University and anonymous Old Members of University College.

Are you involved?
If you are involved in research or frontline work relating to COVID-19 that you would like to bring to the attention of the Univ community worldwide, please email communications@univ.ox.ac.uk.

Published: 17 April 2020

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