Nigerian doctor invents portable ventilator

Dr. Dayo Olakulehin with the D-Box

There is good news coming from Nigeria for patients who experience respiratory problems.

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention and Dayo Olakulehin, a young medical doctor from Nigeria, has breathed a new life into medical technology.

He designed and built a portable, battery-powered ventilator specifically to help unconscious patients breathe.

The medical device – tagged D-Box – has the potential to save the lives of millions of patients worldwide. The innovative ventilator is designed to automate Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) bags and deliver automated and controlled breaths to patients with respiratory problems.

The idea came to the doctor while he was doing his housemanship at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) Idi Araba, Lagos.

He noticed that many patients who had respiratory failure did not have access to ventilator support due to high cost and non-availability of the machine. The current alternative in many parts of Africa is for health workers to manually ventilate patients using a CPR bag.

This practice can continue for days – or even weeks – depending on the patient’s needs. Health workers would therefore take turns constantly to keep the patient alive by manually compressing the CPR bag.

Olakulehin’s innovative battery-powered invention has solved this drawback by removing the need for human intervention. It is cheap, portable, easy to use and will go a long way in helping to provide solutions that come with respiratory problems.

What pushed Olakulehin into action was a personal experience he had with a patient.

“In 2012, while I was at the Olikoye Ransome Kuti Children emergency ward, LUTH, I had manually ventilated a five year old boy for four hours and at about 2am, I fell asleep, only to be awakened by the boy’s father,” he explained.

“If the child had continued without ventilation for longer than four minutes, it could have resulted in irreversible brain damage. This experience was common among hospital staff at LUTH and other medical facilities.

“It was after one of such incidents the idea for an alternative ventilation method came to my mind. I knew that this method eliminates the dependence on human operated ventilation.”

From a near-tragic situation, the D-Box was born.

But that was just the beginning of the eventful journey. Olakulehin was “just” a doctor, not an inventor or an entrepreneur. He had to learn new skills on the go to make his dream come true.

“I knew having the idea was not sufficient, I needed to find a way to make it a reality,” he said. “I knew nothing about business, patenting or developing innovations.”

He went online looking for help, and I found a course on healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship. From the course, he learnt how to develop a patent. He then approached a number of medical device companies and “found out it was a lot easier to sell a product than to sell an idea.”

At the public presentation of the prototype of the D-Box, Olakulehin said he mulled on the idea for three years trying to take the next vital step. Then he met Mr. Kunle Soriyan and Thelma Ekiyor of Afrigrants.

“This led to the founding of LigandCorp and shifted my paradigm from focusing on one product to creating a company that drives medical innovation, particularly among young Nigerians,” he said.

The search for a prototype developer took the doctor-turned entrepreneur from Nigeria to Canada. There, he collaborated with Inertia, an engineering and design company, to get the prototype ready. 

Olakulehin says the D-Box, “requires little or no expertise to use and is powered by a rechargeable battery that facilitates usage in remote rural communities and urban centers with limited facilities.

“When you encounter an unconscious patient, this happens to be the common pathway for many illnesses. Irrespective of what has caused the patient’s illness, the major common pathway is cardiac arrest. We also have common trauma cases in and out of the emergency room where people are unconscious and need to be resuscitated.

“Circulation and ventilation are keys to life, and that is what we are addressing with the D-Box. It is the ubiquitous device. We are raising the standard. What we used to have is that a doctor manually compressed the CPR bag. What we have done is to move that job to the D-Box. It will allow our trained doctors to pay attention to other critical needs of the patients.

“While the big teaching hospitals have five to six units of ventilators that are electricity dependent and sensitive, the D-box can work on battery power for 8-12 hours. It’s an amazing breakthrough.

“However it does not replace existing ventilators which exist for critical intensive care, it is being introduced to improve the quality of care that is available for the patient.

“It is limited currently because it cannot be used for a child. Unlike existing ventilators that have different modes, this is only Intermittent Positive Pressure Ventilation (IPPV) but we hope to improve it in the future.”

While conventional ventilators averagely cost $30,000 and low-cost alternatives (still in development) are to be sold for $3,000, the D-Box’s introductory price is a mere $300.