Development of an innovative instrument for the online characterization of high frequency percussive ventilators

Sophisticated and expensive equipments are required for measuring the respiratory parameters (pressure and flow) during high-frequency percussive ventilation. The use of pressure transducers of new generation with high sensitivity and reduced response time, proposed in this work, per-mit to simplify the flow measure and to develop a DSP-based system for acquisition and elaboration of respiratory parameters. The realized system is compact, portable, inexpensive and it presents a wide bandwith permitting the online characterization of high-frequency percussive ventilators. In this paper a description of the designed device is carried out together with a validation procedure in order to compare the measures made by our device with those obtained by a laboratory measurement system of respiratory parameters usually used to calibrate the pulmonary ventilators.