TULKARM, Scoring yet another success story, the Palestine Technical University – Kadoorie (PTUK), in the northern West Bank city of Tulkarm, last week announced patenting a high-tech, multifunctional ventilator designed and developed by the university’s own engineers and graduates, only for it to top similar global devices.

“PTUK Ventilator”, a third version of a previously built project, was manufactured in six months by four Palestinian engineers – Ali Shraideh, the siblings Moufeed and Yazeed Alawneh, from the governorate of Jenin, all of whom are mechatronics engineers, and electricity engineer Mohammad Salameh, from the governorate of Tulkarm.

According to the university, the PTUK Ventilator is distinctive in terms of design and manufacturing and is considered a qualitative achievement in which Palestine has outperformed many countries in the world.

When speaking about building ventilators, Shraideh emphasized that the ventilator was manufactured using international standards, whether be it safety, accuracy and the device’s ability to function during emergency situations. But that’s not everything about the Palestinian-made device as many other features are made available in it; some are not even available anywhere.

“This ventilator has eleven breathing systems that cover needs of patients whose cases require ventilators, in addition to applying more new systems,” Shraideh said. “The first is called high-flow; which can usually be used independently, but our device has it built in it. The second is “minute volume control”, which was built at the request of Palestinian doctors. It can be used to check the patient primarily and perform an adjustment that suits the patient’s case.

This system isn’t available in any of the similar devices in the world.” After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for ventilators was a global requirement, said Shraideh, who noted that the PTUK Ventilator was also made to function even if the oxygen generator stops working; a feature that isn’t available in the likes of such a device worldwide.

“Before the COVID-19 outbreak, ventilators weren’t as urgently needed as now, and companies weren’t exactly ready to manufacture ventilators and oxygen generators to solve this crisis,” he said. “We heard a lot of tragic stories happening where oxygen generators stopped working. If the oxygen generator stops, our device will still function at 21% lower. It’ll take oxygen from the air, then pump it to the patient’s lung and will notify the doctor by giving a warning.

In case this isn’t solved within a specific period of time, the device was manufactured to send a text message to the doctor’s mobile phone to notify him and call him, too.” Under the leadership and supervision of the university’s president, Nouraldin Abualrob, the idea of building a ventilator came to application. Shraideh said this time the team still wanted to build a device with international standards, yet with the lowest cost possible.

“We redesigned all the expensive device parts from the scratch in this university and this is why the production cost was low,” he noted. “We managed to avoid paying customs, shipping costs and all that because we rebuilt everything we needed to manufacture the device, yet we still made it with international standards,” he said.

“The marketing plan has been very encouraging considering that everything was handmade in Palestine. Quality-wise, the device matches similar global devices, while price-wise, it is of a low price. The university’s president now aims to produce more devices to cover needs in Palestine before hitting the markets in the Middle East and then the world at large.” According to a statement by the university, many private hospitals, particularly Attil Hospital, asked to buy the ventilator to start using it as “their first top priority.” Shraideh said that no announcements were made during the manufacturing of the device, hence no support was offered from any institution or organization, adding that the costs were provided by either the university and its president’s personal money, as well as the team’s personal money.

Manufacturing the device didn’t exactly come without any obstacles, especially that the production process began back in March 2020, during the first outbreak of the coronavirus in Palestine and the lockdown that followed shortly after.

Shraideh said that the university’s president, Abualrob, helped the team overcome any difficulties they encountered.

“Everything was closed due to the coronavirus outbreak. We couldn’t get any material we need. This is the first obstacle,” said Shraideh.

“Then, thanks to Abualrob, we got permissions to commute between cities to get what we wanted.” He added: “Kadoorie is a technical university. There are no medical fields in here. Such a device requires a lot of medical information about the respiratory system and we didn’t have that. Abualrob coordinated with the biggest hospitals and medical agencies in Palestine in order to get the help and the theoretical background we needed.” Another obstacle the team faced is the disbelief they were faced with due to other local institutions’ failed attempts at manufacturing a ventilator. Therefore, specialists and doctors weren’t convinced that Kadoorie may succeed in building such a high-tech device.

“When doctors saw that we were about to build a device with international standards, they grew to be more excited than us,” said Shraideh. “They started giving us details about the device. They even started comparing it to devices in hospitals, devices that are made in Germany or Japan. They would give us details on some international standard level.” Yazeed Alawneh, another engineer who worked on building the device, noted that this was not the first product ever made in the university but the first in the medical field.

“We have a few more projects in mind, such as oxygen generators at both hospitals and homes,” he said. “We’re going to work on building these projects at the requests of hospitals and doctors.” Alawneh talked about how complicated it was to get into developing such a device considering the COVID-19 outbreak, noting how necessary it was needed and that “hopefully soon [we’ll] reach the stage of self-sustaining in Palestine and nearby countries.” He also spoke on the importance of building this device in Palestine as this is the first time a device with such global standards is made.

“The fact such a complicated device has been manufactured in Palestine is encouraging,” he said. “It’s unprecedented. It’s encouraging for the local manufacturing businesses and other engineers.” Speaking on the motivation behind building the device, Alawneh said that at the beginning the device primarily aimed to help solve the crises caused by the coronavirus outbreak.

“We worked every day on developing the device in the university. We worked for 18 and sometimes 20 hours,” he said. “Sometimes we would even sleep in the laboratory. The main reason was to develop a ventilator that serves the need of our people because there was a need for it.”

Moufeed Alawneh, the graduate who worked on the device while still a student, said that the team is working to register two patents.

“One of the patents we’re trying to register is the mechanism of the device’s ability to mix the air with the oxygen,” he said. “The other is its ability to get the exhale out of the patient’s body. Two of which aren’t available in other similar global devices.”

Jibril Hijjeh, head of the Public Relations Department in Kadoorie, said that this unprecedented achievement has now created a new reality in the educational institutions in Palestine.

“We now have moved from teaching and educating to producing and innovating,” he said. “Kadoorie paved the way for other educational establishments to follow suit and move from being on the receiving end to producing.”

Source: Palestinian News & Info Agency