Top 10 Ways Lung Simulators Benefit Respiratory Therapy Programs

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lung simulation model

Did you know that our lung simulator is used in many facilities that offer Respiratory Therapy programs—throughout the United States—and  around the world? 

Designed and manufactured by Michigan Instruments, our Lung Simulators are utilized in colleges, universities, hospitals and training schools. Their accurate and reliable human pulmonary system simulation capabilities make them an incredible tool for training and education.

Here are 10 reasons why we believe our equipment is a great solution for respiratory therapy programs.

Why Choose Our Lung Simulator for Respiratory Therapy Programs?

1. Lung Condition Simulation

Facilitators can simulate a wide variety of healthy and diseased lung conditions by altering the lung compliance and airway resistance in a one or two-lung simulation. 

The flexibility of the devices provide accurate measurements and data that inform testing, research, and training for any and all lungs!

2. Realistic Volumes

Students work with a realistic total lung volume and residual volume—especially when using the Dual Adult Lung Training & Test Lung. 

This is one of the many features that allows the devices to provide the best representation of the functions of the human pulmonary system.

3. Versatility

There is great versatility in regard to introducing gasses, tapping into the lungs or airways, and connecting auxiliary devices, like CO2 monitors.

This makes teaching easy and convenient, while providing a physical demonstration.

4. Ventilation Dynamics

With the Dual Adult Training & Test Lung, facilitators can simulate unilateral lung disease and the resulting ventilation dynamics.

This contributes to easy demonstration of mechanical ventilation and laboratory exercises with ventilators.

5. Spontaneous Breathing

You can simulate a spontaneous breathing patient and evaluate the response of devices in various support modes.

Spontaneous breathing simulations are especially helpful for designing, testing, and providing training on non-invasive and supportive modes of ventilation and oxygenation. Our SBL™ allows control of the breath rate, tidal volume, inspiratory time, and inspiratory flow pattern.

6. Multiple Techniques

Our SBL™ also facilitates education and studies with various oxygen delivery systems, and with the addition non-invasive ventilation devices & techniques. 

7. Helpful Displays

When you add the PneuView software, you are able to see real-time data and waveform displays of pressure, volume, and flow, even when using simple ventilation devices like bag-valve-mask (BVMs), emergency ventilators, and CPAP systems.

8. Recordings 

When using the PneuView software, facilitators and educators have the ability to capture ventilation data. This data can be graphed, tabulated, or digitally recorded and retrieved for later review, demonstration, and analysis. 

9. Save Data

Students should have a simple and convenient way to perform research and keep track of their findings—and our software is more than capable of achieving that. With our PneuView systems, students can conduct research and easily save their data.

10.  Easy and Durable

Last but not least, and probably the best benefit of our equipment in Respiratory Therapy Programs, is that it’s easy to use—and built to stand the test of time. 

Many facilities have been using our products for years.  The PneuView software was designed with simplicity in mind, and our software continues to evolve based on the needs of our customers. 

Our customers have been vocal about how our equipment has been able to benefit them:

“We have been using Michigan Instruments Training Lung Simulators in our Respiratory Care program for many years and we love them. The lung simulator easily provides simulation of a variety of lung conditions that students can adjust to complete a variety of lab exercises. They are versatile, and a great tool for giving students hands-on experience with mechanical ventilation techniques, simulation of disease states for understanding pathology, and much more!”

– Dr. Ann Flint, Program Director, Respiratory Care – Jackson College

Learn More About How Our Lung Simulators Benefit Respiratory Therapy and Other Educational Programs

Medical professionals, directors, and educators around the world have chosen to partner with us and use our equipment in their programs. Our Lung Simulation product line continues to expand  to better service Respiratory Therapy Programs everywhere.

If you’re interested in learning more about our lung simulation devices, the PneuView Software, or any of our additional products, contact us anytime for more information.

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Top Tips For Patient Attraction And Retention In Your Hospital

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After doing extensive research, we’ve found the top tips to help you to attract and retain patients.

Perhaps the two most important factors in the longevity of your hospital’s success are attracting new patients and retaining ones for future medical procedures they need. 

Patient satisfaction is what drives hospitals forward in funding, reputation, and much more—therefore, it’s important to know how to keep them satisfied. This practice is complex, but when executed properly, can result in great success for your hospital.

Keep reading to learn about some tips we found for attracting and retaining patients.

Tips to Attract Patients

Marketing hospitals requires brand-building and sales support, but there’s more to it than that. Making positive connections is the key factor.

Here are some tips for making those connections:

1. Know Your Niche

Consumers have several choices when it comes to products and services, including hospitals. Understanding the distinctions among different types of healthcare facilities can help you address them more effectively. 

2. Learn What Patients Want

When a patient chooses a healthcare provider, they have a lot to consider. Therefore, it takes time to make the decision. 

Listen to your patients and what they’re looking for. This is a sure way to draw in new patients, and keep your current ones happy.

3. Consider Your Online Presence

Social media and website upkeep is one of the most important factors for marketing any service. 

Top Patient Retention Strategies

Did you know that there’s a 60-70% chance that an existing patient will continue visiting a healthcare provider after their first appointment?

Patient loyalty indicates trust that has been built throughout their visits. Additionally, they’re more likely to consider recommendations or other valuable services, therefore contributing to a stronger reputation. 

There are many patient retention strategies. Here are a few:

1. Deliver Excellent Service

Like any other business, good service is not just recommended—it’s essential.

2. Show Your Patients You Care

Patients deserve a healthcare professional that truly cares about them. 

All patients are different and require different needs, so take the time to explain why you believe your chosen plan meets those needs. 

3. Ask For Feedback

Requesting feedback from your patients is a great way to better your services. Use the responses to assess which areas your facility is doing well in, and which areas you need to improve in.

Key Investments to Make in Your Hospital To Attract Patients

There are a couple investments you could make that will increase your chances of attracting new patients to your hospital. Here are some ideas:

1. Invest In Comfort

One thing patients and their loved ones look for when searching for new healthcare is comfort, both before and during the visit. Consider modernizing your waiting room with new TVs, more comfortable chairs, or vending machines.

2. Invest In Your Employees

Employees are the ones directly providing care and services to patients. Listen to them, address their concerns, and treat them with the utmost respect, because their concerns often affect the safety of all employees and patients. 

3. Invest In Education And Research

As you know, healthcare is a field that is constantly evolving with new techniques, guidelines, and protocols. 

Continuing education is necessary to broaden the skills of your staff and better equip them to solve problems, which increases productivity, lowers fatigue, and positive patient outcomes. In addition to training, there must be a demonstration of competency and classes to refresh the minds of your staff. 

Our Devices Can Help The Success Of Your Hospital

Education and relief among employees can be the key to drawing in new patients, or improving the satisfaction of your current patients. 

Our Lung Simulators could be your first step to the education and training your organization needs. Additionally, our automated CPR devices give caregivers a little extra relief, ensuring the best possible care for your patients. Contact us today for more information!

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Spontaneous Breathing vs. Mechanical Ventilation in Lung Simulators

spontaneous breathing vs mechanical ventilation

The human lungs work in miraculous ways. Whether your lungs function naturally, or you have a condition that requires breathing assistance, it’s important to make sure you have a healthy breathing process. 

There are many ways the lungs can take in oxygen. Two of these ways include spontaneous breathing, and mechanical ventilation.

Below, we discuss how these breathing methods work, what the differences are, and how lung simulators can mimic both. 

What Is Spontaneous Breathing?

Spontaneous breathing is a term used to describe psychological breathing. 

Controlled by the involuntary nervous system, spontaneous breathing is a reflex. Healthy lungs will automatically breathe air in at all times, while we’re awake and while we’re asleep. 

There are many ways that patients can keep their lungs in good shape to promote healthy breathing. These include, but are not limited to:

  • Regular exercise
  • Balanced diet
  • Watching your weight
  • Practice breathing exercises
  • Keep the air inside your home clean

What Is Mechanical Ventilation?

Mechanical ventilation is a form of life support that helps you breathe when you can’t breathe on your own. It doesn’t directly treat illnesses, but it can stabilize you while other treatments and medications help your body recover. 

Mechanical ventilation keeps your airways open, delivers oxygen and removes carbon dioxide. This treatment method dates back to the late 18th century. However, within the last century, it has become widely introduced into routine clinical practice. 

Thus, it’s become much more sophisticated, expanding its application from the ICU to emergency medicine and even in long-term care.

Examples Of When Mechanical Ventilation Is Needed

There are several reasons why mechanical ventilation might be needed, including to:

  • Deliver high concentrations of oxygen into the lungs
  • Help get rid of carbon dioxide
  • Decrease the amount of energy a patient uses on breathing so their body can concentrate on fighting infection or recovering
  • Breathe for a person who has injury to the nervous system or who has very weak muscles
  • Breathe for a patient who is unconscious because of a severe infection, build up of toxins, or drug overdose

How Our Lung Simulators Are Making A Difference

Michigan Instruments has played a role in the development and research for mechanical ventilation with our lung simulators.  As respiratory care continues to grow and develop, Michigan Instruments continues to contribute with versatile, easy-to-set-up lung simulators.

All of our lung simulators, though versatile in capabilities, aid in the design, engineering, testing, and manufacturing of ventilation devices. 

By offering a wide range of calibrated lung compliance and airway resistance settings, our lung simulators also simulate dynamic spontaneous breathing and breathing efforts. This flexibility allows our devices to replicate hundreds of healthy and diseased lung conditions, while providing highly accurate measurements and data. 

Questions? Contact Us Today

For more information about how our lung simulators can benefit your institution’s research and treatment development, reach out to our team today!

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How Our Infant Lung Simulators Contribute to RSV Research

rsv research
Since the beginning of flu season in October, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) has been on the rise all around the country. RSV typically hospitalizes about 60,000 children each year in the U.S, with the infection season peaking in the winter.

However, according to the CDC, doctors have found more cases in each week this past October than any week in the last two years.

This has driven our dedication to RSV research and to training medical students and practitioners for RSV cases and care. All this is possible with our infant lung simulators.

Understanding the Impact of RSV in Children

RSV is a respiratory virus that causes mild, cold-like symptoms in most people, with an average 7 day recovery time. However, infants are more likely to face far more significant side effects and longer recovery times. 

In children younger than 12 months, RSV is the most common cause of bronchiolitis and pneumonia. Furthermore, one to two out of every 100 children younger than 6 months of age with RSV infection may need to be hospitalized.

Scientists are developing several vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, and antiviral therapies to help protect infants and young children, pregnant people (to protect their unborn babies), and older adults from severe infection.

However, many hospitals, facing staffing shortages, remain overwhelmed this RSV season. Medical schools and hospital leaders should prepare practitioners to treat RSV cases now more than ever. 

Simulating RSV On Our Infant Lung Simulator

Unlike other similar models on the market today, our Infant Lung Simulator provides vast flexibility and several applications for simulating a wide range of patient populations. 

This device realistically simulates infant lung capacity, clinically trains others on ventilator use and respiratory care in a hands-on manner, and simulates unexpected or complex scenarios. 

Additionally, biomedical engineers, manufacturers, and service companies can use these simulators to test the performance of mechanical ventilators and similar respiratory care devices; all in an effort to ensure that their functions are adequate for illnesses like RSV.

How Do Our Simulators Help RSV Patients?

Professionals use our lung simulators to develop new therapy strategies while working against a realistic “load” (simulated lung mechanics). Further, our devices allow trainers to simulate a wide variety of healthy and diseased lung conditions to provide training for proper care of those with viruses or other conditions. Simply put; our devices are extremely versatile.

We take pride in our ability to train and educate current and future medical professionals, with a goal of contributing to research and new developments for care of those with respiratory illness. 

Proactively Train Your Hospital Staff for a Better 2023

We know that good RSV-trained providers are invaluable — and not exactly interchangeable. With RSV still on the rise (and predicted to occur every year), proactive RSV research, training and development is more important than ever. 

To learn more about our Infant Lung Simulator, visit our Lung Simulator Page or contact us directly today!

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How COVID-19 Has Influenced the Rise of Respiratory Therapy

respiratory therapy after covid

Like many other healthcare professionals, respiratory therapists (RTs) have had their work cut out for them ever since the outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020. Their role in the medical field, which was always considered demanding, is now even more complex and ever-changing. 

However, these challenges have pushed them to work even harder to research and practice the best care for those with respiratory complications due to COVID-19. 

Respiratory Therapists’ Role During the COVID-19 Pandemic

After over 2 years of extensive research, it has been proven that COVID-19 can have a major impact on the respiratory system. More severe cases of COVID-19 and its variants can cause long lasting complications to a person’s respiratory system.

Adults aged 65+ and those with other underlying health conditions such as heart disease, cancer, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), may have serious symptoms; with some even having long-term effects.

As the number of patients with COVID-19 has grown, so has the demand for respiratory therapists. Respiratory therapists have provided treatment for those with COVID-19-related respiratory complications in many ways. 

One way is through pulmonary rehabilitation, which helps patients improve lung function, reduce symptoms and improve quality of life. Respiratory therapists help aid these programs through education, exercise, and support. 

How Our Spontaneous Breathing Lung Aids in Respiratory Education

We understand that COVID-19 has affected the respiratory systems of many patients throughout the last few years, and will continue to do so as the virus persists. This is why we are proud to have our Lung Simulators used to contribute to respiratory studies.. 

We recently added the Spontaneous Breathing Lung (SBL™) to our product line. The SBL™ offers a new and improved way to create spontaneous breathing. It’s available as an independent device, or as an upgrade to the current generation TTL or PneuView Simulator.

These simulations are useful for designing, testing, and providing training on non-invasive and supportive modes of ventilation and oxygenation. Additionally, it allows control of breath rate, tidal volume, inspiratory time, and inspiratory flow pattern. 

All these features and more make this device the ideal tool for teaching and learning about COVID-19’s respiratory impact.

Going to AARC Congress 2022? We’ll See You There!

To show our dedication, we will be attending AARC Congress this November. We’re so excited to showcase the SBL™, while connecting with respiratory therapy professionals from across the country!

Learn more about our high-quality lung simulators that you can touch, see, and modify and the differences between each one. Questions? Request a quote, or ask us anything!

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MTU Supports Open-Source COVID-19 Device Research

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HOUGHTON — As COVID-19 cases have surged, the shortage of working ventilators has become one of the biggest obstacles in treating patients.

A Michigan Technological University professor is one of the people working on a solution. Joshua Pearce, Richard Witte Endowed Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and a professor of electrical and computer engineering, is co-editor in chief of HardwareX, an open-source scientific hardware journal. It is now accepting submissions for an issue with proposals for making ventilators and other necessary equipment, such as non-contact thermometers and N95 respirators. Those can be through 3-D printing, or with materials and tools readily available at hardware stores. 

Several previous authors have indicated they will submit papers, Pearce said. One South American researcher is testing an open-source ultraviolet sterilization method that can be used for entire rooms. 

“He had done it for biological research, but he’s adapted it for a hospital setting as well,” Pearce said. 

Submissions will be taken until June 1, then posted online within a week of their acceptance. HardwareX is making the issue available to all to ensure a fast peer review. 

Michigan Tech is also tackling the problem. Pearce runs the Michigan Tech Open Sustainability Technology (MOST) Lab. He is also part of Tech’s Open Source Initiative. 

One approach they are working on is recreating a low-cost ventilator used by a Tech Enterprise team that was deployed in Africa. 

“That is slightly challenging because we only have access to one of the labs on campus,” Pearce said. 

Testing is using artificial lungs from Michigan Instruments to simulate the ventilators’ effect on humans. 

“No one is quite there yet,” Pearce said. “It’s very, very challenging on the software side to control the pressures so you don’t damage people’s lungs.”

COVID-19 closures have already caused problems with access to some places. One of the most promising leads was a paper published in 2019 by a research team in Pakistan, with whom Pearce had been working. The team had access to an artificial lung and could run tests immediately. However, their university was shut down due to the pandemic. 

“The last version of the code is stuck on some computer at the university, and nobody can get access to it,” Pearce said. 

Other researchers are looking at converting a CPAP machine to assist people in breathing. 

All of this is taking place when teams are restricted to what Pearce calls “the absolute worst way to do designing”: limits on how many can be in a lab, limited access to equipment and disrupted supply chains. Before the next pandemic, Pearce said, there should be government-funded open-source designs pre-tested and ready to put into place when the need arises.

“That would relieve a lot of the costs associated with having stockpiles, and really help the countries that don’t have the capital to build 10,000 ventilators,” he said. 

In March, Pearce conducted a review of open-source ventilators. While promising, he said, the systems that had been tested and peer-reviewed did not have full documentation. Those that were documented were either early designs or had not finished testing. 

“With the considerably larger motivation of an ongoing pandemic, it is assumed these projects will garner greater attention and resources to make significant progress to reach a functional and easily replicated open source ventilator system,” he said. 

A $1,500 ventilator system being developed by the Innovative Global Solutions Enterprise team at Tech had been one of the furthest along, Pearce said. However, it could not reach its fundraising goal through Superior Ideas, Michigan Tech’s crowdfunding platform. 

“If it had been funded, we’d probably have the solution already and we could shop it out,” Pearce said.

See The Daily Mining Gazette Article.

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