Biomedical Engineering Online presents a special collection on “Innovation and step-change in mechanical ventilation”. Mechanical ventilation is one of the single largest reasons for intensive care unit admission, length of stay, mortality, and thus cost. However, the overall method of care has not fundamentally changed in the last 40 years, despite the appearance of new technologies and imaging modalities with the potential to improve care. Covid-19 has further highlighted the need for greater productivity and personalisation in mechanical ventilation (MV) care to meet growing demand, as well as the spikes of demand seen in pandemic. Significantly increasing the personalisation and productivity of MV care will require major inter-disciplinary efforts from clinical medicine, engineering, computational sciences, and physiology / genomics. However, technologically and clinically feasible solutions alone potentially may not suffice, illustrating a role for social sciences to ensure such innovations are adopted. This special section specifically seeks novel, inter-disciplinary approaches to mechanical ventilation, from new ideas with minimal validation, to examination of how innovation is adopted in intensive care medicine and how this understanding can be used to improve translation of innovation to clinical practice, and everything in between.
This collection is now closed to submissions.
Guest Editors: Prof Knut Moeller, Furtwangen University, Germany; Prof Geoffrey Chase,University of Canterbury, New Zealand; Dr Thomas Desaive, University of Liege, Belgium