The difficulties that most of the sanitary areas had since the appearance of Covid-19 to obtain respirators caused that innumerable initiatives have arisen. One of them is that of three engineers from the Fentotek company who developed a project to manufacture mechanical fans. They worked on the design of this medical equipment, each one from a different place in the province of Ourense.
Fentotek is a company that was born last year with engineers who have been in the industry for a long time and who are dedicated to electronics design. His business plans never entered into the manufacture of medical utensils. They worked on devices for communications, industrialization, electronics, power… but they had never made medical equipment. This involved a documentation workload unknown by industry type.
The idea appeared through the demand that exists in the market for this type of device that is difficult to obtain, because there is a shortage and it also has a very high price. The engineers joined forces to manufacture them based on a respirator that had a lot of media impact, such as the one made by the Catalan company OxyGEN, which automated an Ambú-type resuscitation balloon. “What we decided to do was to take advantage of the fact that we had a lot of experience in automation of equipment, and we created a team that goes further,” says Rubén Otero, CEO of Fentotek.
What they are looking for is that this fan is not dependent on an automated manual respirator, but is capable of withstanding ventilation for a long time. “In addition to this, we want this device to serve to monitor patients. We also intend to provide a concrete solution here and in other countries where access to resources is limited, both in Africa and in South America ”.
Currently they have the device made by parts, and they are trying to assemble the device, which will be manufactured in the coming weeks, with the idea that at the beginning of June they could already test it. This project was selected by the Galician Innovation Agency (GAIN) along with seven others, and will have the financial support of this entity, dependent on the Ministry of Economy, Employment and Industry of the Xunta de Galicia, to develop solutions based on the R + D + i in the context of the crisis caused by Covid-19.
